Sample:
Rich snippets help you to:
- Attract potential buyers while they are searching for items to buy on Google.
- Submit your product listings for free.
- Control your product information. You can maintain the accuracy and freshness of your product information, so your customers find the relevant, current items they're looking for.
One issue with OpenCart's default aggregate rating is that it truncates the fraction instead of rounding it off. So if your aggregate rating is 4.9 (i.e. anything less than perfect 5 but more than 4), then OpenCart shows rating as 4 and 4 stars. This is not good or fair as your customers might think that average rating is lower than it is. But it's even worse if you are using Rich Snippets because then this lower than real rating shows on Google results page.
So, an additional task that this extension performs from v 1.8 onwards is that it fixes the ratings. With this extension your shop shows stars based on rounded off average rating, and Google is provided accurate average rating, which seems more realistic to Google and will help your Rich Snippet show up more quickly in results, and not be snippet-spam flagged.
Because this is a vQmod, no core files are touched, and the changes should carry over to the next version.
Extension page: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6485
update 29 Mar 2013: 1.9.7 released
Requirements
- You need Opencart 1.5.5.1 or Opencart 1.5.4.1. Opencart is available at http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... d/download
- You must have vQmod (tested on 2.3.2) preinstalled. vQmod is available at http://code.google.com/p/vqmod/downloads/list
- This extension is made for the Default theme. Hence you should have the default theme as the active theme for this to work.
If your theme is *VERY* similar to the Default theme, this extension MIGHT work out-of-the-box for you. If it doesn't, you can easily adapt it for other themes. If you don't know how, and need me to do paid customization, please PM me.
- Download the latest version of the extension compatible with your version of Opencart from http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6485
- Unzip using a program such as WinZip, WinRar or Windows's inbuilt compressor
(In Windows, right click on the downloaded zip file, and select Extract All) - Use an FTP program such as FileZilla to upload all contents of the uploads folder to your shop's root.
If you've been living under a rock and still use v 1.0 of the extension, then to update:
- Perform all the steps as described under installation.
- On your server, delete the file /vqmod/xml/z-google-rich-snippets.xml
After installing, you can check that it;s working by providing a product page URL at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
When checking your product page at the above tool, remember:
- You will see stars only if the product page you are testing has reviews.
- Scroll down and see the whole page. The relevant stuff is under the headings "Google search preview" and "Extracted rich snippet data from the page"
- Under the heading "Extracted Author/Publisher for this page", you will see "Page does not contain authorship markup. Learn more." Do not panic! This is normal. Product and Review pages are not supposed to have authorship markup. Authorship markup is related more to blog posts and articles and requires integration with Google+ accounts...an entirely different beast from what we are trying to do at OpenCart
Google has only implemented pictures for 2 items - recipes and authors. They havent implemented products yet. Hopefully the will soon. Though soon could mean a few months. Likely to be rolled out in US first. Add another few months for other countries.
That being said, if you read the output of the above tool carefully, you will note that Google can see the product picture - it correctly grabs the product image URL.
You can use http://linter.structured-data.org/ instead of the Google tool and you will see the image. But that's false hope because the image will not appear in Google Search results.
Works with GWT?
Yes, if you use Google Webmaster Tools, then your product pages shall appear under "structured data" there. BUT only after Google indexes your site after installing this extension. This could take a couple or hours or several weeks, depending on Google's schedule for your site.
So now I will see snippets for my product pages in Google?
The short answer is: Yes, but not immediately.
The (slightly) longer answer is: Yes, your product pages shall appear with the structured data, including review stars, price, availability, etc in Google's search results. However, there are a couple of caveats:
Google's search results usually take a while before they show snippets data. Google search does not know about the snippets data till the spider comes to index your site. For some sites that could be a few hours, for others, a few weeks.
Also, Google has slightly dispersed rollout with respect to geographical locations. In some countries you will see that more of your snippets appear in Google SERPs faster, while in others they may take an inordinately long time.
Finally, whether snippets would be shown at all depends entirely on Google Search algorithm and is beyond your (or our) control. All you can do is follow Google's instructions, provide data in the right format (which Google tool check shows) and hope for the best. That's why Google Tool page always has this disclaimer
Theme-specific versionsNote that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results.
For Shoppica 2: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=7140
For Elegantcart: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6534
For OpenAmazon: http://www.opencart.com/index.php?route ... on_id=6536
Warning
If you have added any custom modules that show rating stars, this extension may cause the stars to stop showing. The fix is simple - in the affected module's template file, change
Code: Select all
stars-<?php echo $product['rating']; ?>.png
Code: Select all
stars-<?php echo round($product['rating']); ?>.png
This mod adds my link to your site's footer (next to the Opencart link). It would be nice if you don't remove it. If you do remove it, please consider donating.