Five star rating showing in Google search

[entclub]

Is there a way we can get star review ratings to appear in the google search? I've search through plugins but they all appear to work within the site itself rather than rating the site as a whole.

Would love to hear your thoughts on this, how it can be done or whether it's planned to be incorporated in later releases.

[Dan Nickerson]

I moved this post to the Wordpress forum as it's unrelated to Socrates.

As far as I know the ratings system only works with websites that have reviews inside of Google Places.

Can you give an example of where you've seen Google list a ratings system for a website outside of their Sponsored Ads or Google Places system?

[OLS2011]

Dan is right about the ratings system working only with websites that already have reviews online (hopefully positive). What you need to do if you want to get your star rating to show in the Google search engine result pages, you need to start encouraging your clients to write positive reviews about your business or website and assign a good rating (1-5). You can also write reviews yourself obviously, however doing so often results in Google seeing that the reviews came from the same IP address and either tossing them out or slapping your site with a penalty, which you REALLY don't want if you are looking to increase your search traffic or placement. Some businesses will offer incentive programs that encourage clients to review their site by offering them something in return, such as a free service or discount on their next purchase, basically anything that the customer would feel would be worth five minutes of their time. Once you have a decent amount of reviews, you will start seeing them appear in the search results. Hope this helped, let me know if you have any further questions or if I left anything out...I often do.

[Dan Nickerson]

I also want to point out something about OLS2011's post.

Every day I delete and ban spam posters whose only goal is to get a backlink on a forum. They leave a junk comment and their backlink. But OLS2011's post is the textbook way to build quality backlinks that get approved even if you're not a Socrates user.

Add a comment of real value that contributes to the conversation.