Test Your hReview Tags to See if Google Will Grab Your Reviews for Google Places

I have been an early embracer of the rich snippet technology as when it was released about a year ago I felt that it would be to my and my client’s advantage to have the coding in place. However if you are expecting your hReview rich snippets to be picked up by Google Places or Google Maps from your website, you’d better do what I did and check your code.

Although my code was correct, for pages with more than one review, Google now requires an aggregate rich snippet tag – who knew! This is how I found out. Use this Google tool to add the URL of your page with your rich snippets and hReview tags. Find out if Google will be picking up your rich snippets. You may be like me; having to go back and quickly add an aggregate review tag to the page listing all your reviews as a number and the average rating.

Here’s the link to the tool: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets It is called the Rich Snippet testing tool.

With Google Places adding your own website reviews to your Google Places Page, now’s the time to help Google help you by making sure your code is ready to be picked up by the spider.