As you are probably aware product reviews are a vital part of any e-commerce store, providing useful feedback both for your company and other consumers along with validation of your brand. Reviews are now so popular with consumers that a whole industry has grown to provide review services. There are also countless blogs, online videos and web sites dedicated to reviewing products. So it is no wonder that Google now sees this content as relevant to search results.

Now Google have been displaying external product reviews within it’s search results for quite some time now, as show in the LCD TV search results image.
What’s new is that Google can now display the reviews from your own web site in the snippet text for your listing in the search results. Using their new Rich Snippets combined with correct coding on your web site you can now make your products stand out from the crowd in the search results. Of course all other SEO best practise applies to ensure you appear in the results to start with, but with the reviews displaying your links become even more clickable.

Using something called microformats you can now add specific tags to parts of your web site that will allow Google to extract and display this information. If you want to start using these just pass the links to the technical details your web developers.

As well as reviews, Google can now pick up on and highlight event information and information on people from social networking web sites in the results. See Googles’ latest blog post for more details.

By the way you don’t have to be selling the products yourself to use the code to show the reviews and star ratings!