Good Morning from wetherby UK 
Imagine this scenario… Your working on SEO for a client and they call you asking why review sites have stars about their company in the SERPS whilsts their site has no stars. Here is a specific example of the situation:
“If you find your website is getting reviewed by Trip advisor & Yelp etc how do you get the stars to appear under your listing and not have third party sites grabbing your glory?”
Thanks in advance,
David
I don’t think that would be in any way possible. For a start, you might have lots of different star rankings – on one site you might be given 5* but on another only 2*. Secondly, the star ranking is specific to the site where that ranking has been given – it’s their property, not yours.
The whole point about independent review sites is that they’re independent. If I am interested in finding a review of a product/service, I don’t want to be taken to the company’s own website! What this comes down to is marketing and management – your clients need to capitalise on the opportunities afforded by these independent review sites, such as ensuring that they have suitable logos, photos, welcome/intro text, website links, contact details etc. Also try to make sure that there are no bad reviews, and get in touch with the review site in question if there are any that are outright libelous. What you want is for people who are interested in the review to click on the review site link, read a good review and click through to your own website. That way, everyone’s happy.
(And as long as your site is ranking above the review sites, you’re on a winning streak anyway!)
Those stars in your screenshot are from reviews on Google Places. Get them yourself by signing up for a Places account and getting a few people to leave a review.
HI JJ, yes this is another methos, registeringwith google places puts some control back with the client
The other option you can try, but there is no guarantee it will work, would be to post some reviews or testimonials on your client’s site and use the review micro data format to mark them up. The reviews micro data allow you to specifically markup the review/star rating.
There is no guarantee that Google will use and display this information, but you can give it a try. I am not sure how long it might take for Google to index and use it, if they do, so be patient. If you try this you probably want to have 4 or 5 different reviews marked up rather than just 1 or 2.
If you try it, I would be curious to see if it is successful or not.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=146645
