Writing services with a focus on producing reviews should take notice because Google has said it is now supporting a new type of rich snippets scheme aimed at “critic reviews.”
Users who search for movies using desktop or mobile search queries may, from now on, see a new set of Knowledge Graph cards appear at the top of the search results on Google. These cards will contain information derived from movie review critics.
Speaking about the new Knowledge Graph cards, Jonathan Wald, product manager with Google based in New York, pitched the rollout as another step in the process of giving publishers an opportunity to “increase the discoverability and consumption” of content.
Google rolled out its Rich Snippets feature for the first time in May 2009 as a new way of presenting Snippets and using Google’s algorithms for the purposes of highlighting structured data embedded in webpages. In the period since the introduction of rich snippets, structured data has become increasingly important in terms of Google Search, and the company has been adding to its Knowledge Graph to reach a better understanding of what motivations lie behind user queries.
Publishers using markup to identify reviews they themselves have posted and how they tie in with Knowledge Graph entities are in a position to increase visibility of those reviews and target new audiences.
Providers publishing reviews in long form in respect of these verticals can get up and running immediately by selecting parts of their reviews and adding schema.org markup to the pages on their sites. By doing so, they are communicating to Google which selections of the reviews they have a preference for, the URL linked to the review and other metadata that enables Google to display in its search engine the right review for the right entity.
Google emphasises that it can take on board a number of markup formats, including the JSON+LD data format, making it easier than it has ever been to build structured data relating to reviews into a webpage.
