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hReview is a specific microformat intended to designate review content in a webpage and allow it to be easily found and indexed by search engines like Google and other web applications. Taking existing XHTML or HTML tags, passed in a systematic way, you can make easy distinction of what your data is about for search engines, when using microformats. hCalendar - for events, hCard - for contact information, and hProduct - for products are examples of other specific microformats. Microformats do not affect how your web page renders in a browser, they simply make your source code smarter and have an impact on how web applications and tools collect, understand, and process the information in your web pages.

The hReview microformat is broken into several different properties including the date/time the review was written, a summary of the review, the author, the item being reviewed, a rating, a permalink to the review, and others. For more information and specific formatting questions regarding hReview properties check out the following site: http://microformats.org/wiki/hreview-profile.

To learn how to create a review site to easily and automatically integrate the hReview microformat, check out this article: Creating A Review Site

Properly formatting and using the hReview microformat in your web content will allow you to take advantage of several web features including Google’s Rich Snippets feature. Google defines this feature as ‘giving users convenient summary information about their search results at a glance’. If you search ‘piccolos italian restaurant’ on Google the number one result includes a rich snippet summary of the reviews available on the City-Search site. As the example demonstrates the rich snippets allow a surfer to search for a product and/or service and then see a quick summary of the reviews of that product on any particular site. Google only pulls this data from your site if you are using the hReview in your source code.

To see the different types of review sites marketers use, with examples, read this post: Types Of Review Sites

With the data that hReview provides to the web surfer, you can be certain you will see more of a click through rate to your site when this data is used. It’s nice to know some specific details before going any further and microformats allows you to easily give that extra info.