How to add stars to your lisiting

I dont know why but most of the people still don't know about the structured meta data & the awesomeness it can add to your site's listing in SERP ! Adding structured data to your site has been proven to be a successful way to  increase click though rate, however for the first time when I saw a star rating in SERP for a specific query then the very first thing that hit my mind that the site must be a really good one for which it had been rated with 5 stars! This is exactly how a common user thinks, they dont know that this can be manipulated  as well. Not only star ratings though...structured data can also be used to show navigation bread crumb links below the original site listing, for a long time Google had accepted three types of structured data to include in their search result & those are 1. Micro data 2. Microformats 3.RDFa . However to avoid the contradiction between datas , Google now currently advices to use microdata only. Lets get into the part for which you have been waiting so far..adding stars to your listing..yay!

First make sure what type of rating you want to use for your site, for example is it going to be aggregated review or a individual one? If it's about a aggregated review then the html should look somewhat like this...

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product"> <span style="display:none; padding:2px 0 0 10px;" itemprop="name">Website Design</span>
<div itemprop="aggregateRating" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating"> 
<meta content="1" itemprop="worstRating">
<meta content="5" itemprop="bestRating">
<p style=" font-size:11px; font-family:Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; font-weight:bold; color:#fbcf3a; margin-left:15px;"><span itemprop="ratingValue">4.5</span> STARS OUT OF  <span itemprop="reviewCount">7</span> REVIEWS</p>

 If it's about s individual product review then it should be like this..

<div itemscope itemtype="http://data-vocabulary.org/Review">
    <span itemprop="itemreviewed">White shirt</span>
    Reviewed by <span itemprop="reviewer">Adrian thomas</span> on
    <time itemprop="dtreviewed" datetime="2009-01-06">Jan 6</time>.
    <span itemprop="summary">A great one for a night out</span>
    <span itemprop="description">A great shirt for all purpose use, flaunt your style</span>
    Rating: <span itemprop="rating">4.5</span>
  </div>

Now once you are done with the adding part, dont forget to check out if you have done it perfectly, use Google structure data testing tool & see the search result preview, are the stars there? Awesome isn't it? 

Canonicalization & related issues

In the year 2009, Google & yahoo both announced about their support for the use of rel=canonical, yet till this date there is a lot of misconception about this simple one line html among the webmasters & Seo’s. However in this article we will try to discuss in brief about this & find out the solution to our common misconception.

1.Using rel=canonical cross domain

rel=canonical is just a simple way to tell Google about a page that is duplicate to another one,  but it doesn’t entitle you to use  rel=canonical cross domain if it appears to be manipulative. However you can use it in cases where multiple sites are owned by the same webmaster & the content of those sites are helpful to the users, but you need to make sure that they don’t share duplicate content as this would be seen as a serious violation of Google’s guidelines.

2. Using rel=canonical on entire site

You see excessive use of canonical tag is never encouraged, though any clear evidence of Google penalizing this practice has not been found but still we should avoid it as much as possible.

3.  301 redirects or rel=canonical ?

It depends…from an  seo standpoint of view they both serves a similar purpose, but there is a difference between this two…a 301 redirection takes the visitor to your desired canonical page where as the rel=canonical doesn’t, therefore if you want to keep both the pages available to the visitors then use rel=canonical tag, otherwise you may want to use a 301 redirect only.

4.Can you prevent indexing by using rel=canonical ?

Yes, Google does honor this practice therefore avoid indexing pages with rel=canonical

5. Does rel=canonical hampers page authority?

No if you do it properly then you should not be having any problem regarding the page authority issue, it acts exactly like a 301 redirect & passes the page value to the non-canonical page

6. Should I use chain 301 or rel=canonical?

Although chain redirection can pass page authority but still the practice is not recommended as it looks sloppy, & sometimes might even cost you in the form of reduced page rank.

7. Can I use 301 redirection for solving duplicate content issue?

If you have a choice to control the duplicate contents on your site, why would you let Google do it for you? You are using rel=canonical on duplicate pages to let google know about the original page, then google deciding which is the actual page, & then... only then perhaps Google might exempt it from  duplicate content penalty , I ask you…why would you risk it when you have an option to deal with the  issue yourself?