Author Hreview Review – Increase Search Traffic With Eye Catching SERPS

Matthew Woodward Updated on Jan 29, 2020

Reviewed by: Matthew Woodward

Rating:

Updated On: January 29, 2020

Summary:

This used to be a great suite of plugins, but it has being abandoned by the developer and has many serious bugs and performance issues.

More Details

The Author Hreview plugin pack makes it easy to upgrade your site, increasing search traffic with eye catching search engine results.

The plugin pack contains 3 plugins which each do something different-

Author Hreview: A simple review plugin and is actually the plugin I have used since the launch of the blog to power the review boxes you sometimes see.
WordPress Reviews: This is an advanced review plugin that transforms WordPress into a fully featured review site including user reviews, ratings & custom fields!
Customer Testimonials: Makes it easy for you to collect and display user testimonials anywhere on your site.

So whether you want to add simple review boxes to your blog or transform it into a fully fledged reviews site these plugins are perfect!

They also include a bunch of widgets (you can see one in my sidebar) to display your latest/most popular/related reviews and so on.

Rich Snippet Markup

Each of these plugins also includes support for the review rich snippet markup. This is the magic stuff that allows you to dispay review ratings and stars directly in the search results like this-

Author Hreview Review

I’ve been using the Author Hreview wordpress plugin since the blog launched 12 months ago.

It takes minutes to setup and will instantly make your site more visible in the SERPS while increasing the click through rate of affiliate links.

Anyway check out my more detailed video tutorial & review-

Video Transcript

Hi Guys Matthew Woodward here and today you’re going to learn how to upgrade your site to increase its visibility in the search results by adding review boxes to your posts like mine.

As well as transform WordPress into a fully featured reviews platform with user reviews and have the ability to collect and display testimonials from your readers.

For my blog I actually used AuthorHreview which includes 3 plugins, you get AuthorHreview which is the original plugin for adding review boxes and ratings and things like that along with some custom widgets.

You get WordPress Reviews which actually transforms WordPress into a complete review system allowing people to submit user reviews and custom fields you know. If you had a hosting website you could have different fields, or if you have a mobile phone reviews website you can have things like camera, display and things like that.

Again this allows users to submit their own reviews and display aggregated results, it works really really well.

The other plugin that you get as a bonus if the Customer Testimonials plugin which allows you to easily collect testimonials as well as display them in a really cool way pretty much anywhere on your blog.

So let’s take a look at each of the plugins you get in more detail.

So first of all let’s take a look at Author Hreview and this plugin adds this box here and makes it really easy to do. You have a bunch of options and things you can include; if we take a look at this one you can see this actually includes my name and some more date information and things like that.

And it also includes a couple of different widgets you can add a simple list like this or one that actually includes the images if you choose to include an image.

And I actually use Author Hreview on my blog here, you can see it I don’t actually use an image and you’ll see this box on a lot of the review posts and down here is the same widget.

And the nice thing about Author Hreview is it makes it really easy to add the review rich snippets in pretty much any post on your blog in a few seconds. This is what it looks like beforehand and this is what it looks like afterwards so you can see the rating there along with the data it has extracted.

If you also integrate authorship you will get results that look like this with your rating and also include your picture.

Setting up Author Hreview is pretty easy you get a dedicated menu here along with some default settings that you can come in and change. You can choose to actually hide that ratings box you’ve just seen but this will still include the rich snippet markup so Google will display the stars in search results.

But I actually quite like that review box and it helps increase clicks and conversions with the affiliate links.

You can also choose to hide the reviewed by and dates and I showed you those 2 different examples at the start. And you have some other options here like the width of the review box, how its aligned, there’s 3 different styles to choose from, the colour of the button along with the more details button.

And let’s take a look at actually adding a post with a review. So if we come to add new post and let’s just give it a dummy title and drop some dummy content and what we really want to pay attention to is this author review box here.

So we can just select a rating, say 3.5 stars – the name of the product SENuke. A quick review summary, a great tool to build links with but pretty expensive to run every month.

You have the option to choose if it’s a paid review that will also include a link to a disclaimer if you do paid reviews on your site. Other details you can include here, you can include the price, version information, type of product it is and the author name. I tend to only enter the price here, so what is SENuke these days – $147 a month?

Display options, there’s 3 different templates here – I quite like the default one. You can choose to hide the ratings box on individual pages rather than doing it globally in the main settings here.

And you can also manually place the ratings box if you want by dropping the shortcode. So if you didn’t want it to appear where it normally does you could just drop it into the last paragraph here for example or right at the end of the post.

I quite like it at the top of the post, above the fold it sums everything up nicely and makes it easy for people to click your link.

You can also upload an image which im going to do quickly if we just select this file and let that crunch it and hit insert into post, that will add the image for us. The image alignment you can change as well and you can also include a link so that is going to be, oop we need to include http.

You can change the button text if you want, so get the trial and also the button alignment and whether the link is dofollow or not.

So let’s just publish that page and take a look at how that actually looks. If we come to view post here and here you can see this is the review box that we have just put together.

You can also see the widgets have automatically updated and if we come across to the rich snippets tool and preview that new post you can see we’ve got the ratings.

So that is Author Hreview but what about if you want to build a more fully featured review site?

If you want to be a little bit more advanced than Author Hreview then you can also use the WP Review plugin. This replaces Author Hreview and pretty much does the same thing but with a lot more advanced features.

So here you can see the post with the WP Reviews plugin and you can see it makes quite an impact here. You can define different fields here and provide ratings for all of them and I’ll show you how to do all of that in a minute.

Along with the summary and start your trial button and everythning like that. What makes WP Review even better though is it integrates user reviews as you can see here and that allows people to submit a comment with their own reviews which gets added to the comment box – you can’t see it because I’m logged in at the minute.

Then people can submit them and it aggregates them here and also provides a user rating alongside the editor rating. You can also see this appear in the recent comments widget here when people have left ratings and you can see the recent reviews widget that we saw with Author Hreview.

One of the other things it adds is pros and cons which you can put at the end of posts and the rich snippet integration is pretty cool.

This is what it looks like if it’s just you have reviewed it and this is what it looks like if you’ve got ratings coming off users, so it’s an aggregated review and also displays a price directly in the search results.

You can also customise it so that it appears at end of posts like this rather than at the top which some people might prefer and it also comes with a bunch of shortcodes so you can display your reviews pretty much anywhere.

So this is the most recent review with an image and a summary. Here’s all the reviews without a summary and I’ve only got 2 setup on this test site here. You can have all reviews without a summary and I just put this in a div with a width of 200 pixels and you can see it wraps the text around nicely.

Or you can list related reviews based on tags so if you have a couple of posts reviewing 2 different link building services and they both have the tag link building you can actually list all the related link building reviews here.

Again you can choose whether to display the image or the summary or not easily with the shortcode.

Setting up the plugin is really easy, again you get the dedicated menu and there are some settings here. If you scroll through they are pretty self-explanatory. You’ve got the introduction of the currency option here for when you are displaying prices.

Again you have full control over everything, you don’t have to have the user ratings so people can submit their reviews if you don’t want you can just untick that.

Theres a couple of protection options here to stop people spamming your site up with reviews and all of the settings for the review box are here. Where to show it whether it’s below the content or at the top although you can change this on a post by post basis.

Whether to hide the rating box and the various other information along with the button colour and default button text which again you can change on a post by post value.

There are some other settings down here that most people won’t need to touch so you can ignore those. But once you’ve got the settings set up how you want if we come and add a new post.

Let’s show you how to set this up, so let’s do that, paste in dummy content and give it a quick category and down here let’s start filling out this box.

So give it a rating, the name, and a quick summary, ok. And if you want the user reviews snippets to be used as the rich snippet in Google that I showed you before you would tick this box and now we can move over to details, the price here is $147 a month. The version I’m not going to add, the criteria I’m going to set up here.

So I’m going to have ease of use, 70%. Cost, 75%, updates, 95% and if you want to list the pros and cons at the end of the review you can do that here and I’m going to use some bullets in here to make them a bit easier to read so let’s fill those out.

Powerful tool, well updated, cons – expensive to run, steep learning curve. Now we can move onto display and here you can choose where to show your ratings box either above or below the content or whether to hide the box entirely and again you can manually place it with the rating box shortcode if you wanted it in the middle for example.

Let’s add an image, I’ve already uploaded one here, choose full size and insert into post. The link here and the button text and you can also change the author name if you want to, so let’s publish that and take a look at how that looks.

Ok view post – and here you can see ok so that text doesn’t fit in very well so we can just come back and hit edit post, change that there, hit update. Come back into the post and that should be looking good now, there we go.

So that’s how easy it is to add a review box to your posts along with the user reviews and you can see you don’t need any technical knowledge whatsoever but let’s take a quick look at how we can use the shortcode within this post.

So there are 2 types of shortcode that you can use with different options. And you can say either recent reviews which pulls them in chronological order and you can say I want to display the 5 most recent reviews with images and summaries.

And there is related reviews and you could say I just want to display 5 related reviews or 2 related reviews and if you want to include the images you would just write images=yes and if you wanted to include the summary summary=yes or if you didn’t want the images but wanted the summary, you could have that.

If you wanted to just display the most recent review, you could have recent_review num=1 to only return 1. Along with the summary but without the image and that will split them up for you.

So if we take a look at how they look, let’s just break them up a little bit. Recent reviews 5 image summary, related reviews 2 summary and then most recent review and the related review pulls in related reviews based on tag. So let me add the review tag to this post, click add and update and let’s take a look at what this shortcode actually produces for us.

And here you can see the recent reviews, there isn’t 5 there are only 3 at the moment but here is what it pulls in for us. The related reviews without the image but including the summary and the most recent review without the image but including the summary and that is how you use the shortcode.

So you can display reviews pretty much anywhere you want on your site. Whether that’s in a post, in the sidebar here, at the start of posts and at the end of posts.

The other plugin that is included in the pack is the testimonials plugin and its actually pretty cool you can output the various testimonials you’ve got really easily in different ways and you can have them look like this, or as a tool tip like this or with a sort of speech bubble type view.

It also includes some nice widgets so you can choose where to display them in the sidebar and how many and what information and things like that and the really impressive part is the submission of the testimonials themselves.

You get a little bit of shortcode that outputs this form so people can just fill it out and automatically get sent it for your approval. You can also use it to take your rich snippets and add an aggregated review of your testimonials to the home page.

So everyone that submitted a testimonial, you can see here there are 2 on my test site here with an average rating of 4.5 and the sites free. You can add that as well and thats a really genuine way of valuing your site in the SERPS with actual testimonials from real people.

But let’s take a look at how we set it up. If you come to the testimonials menu in the back end here you can view all of the current testimonials and if we just jump in and have a look at what they look like. So here is a quick summary, the actual testimonial itself – the rating, name, website details and it actually pulls the image in automatically from gravatar based on their email address which is pretty cool.

And you can also add new testimonials so if you’ve already got some you’ve collected elsewhere and I’ve actually got a bunch in Evernote that I’ve collected from all over the web as things have gone on you can just add them in here.

You can also setup different categories for testimonials so if you have different types of services that you offer you can have testimonials for each specific service and there are a few settings in the backend here. Here is where you add the FrontPage snippets to your homepage based on aggregated review and you can tell it to use the real data here.

And you also have a few other settings here including some SEO settings but you can leave those unticked.

Let’s quickly take a look at how you display the actual testimonials once you’ve got some added into the plugin. If you come and edit this page and you can see what they look like here. So you’ve got the testimonials simple, testimonials tooltips and testimonials bubble and it really is as simple as that.

And if you wanted to change how many are displayed you could just add num=1 and that will only have 1 displayed here and 2 displayed on these other tooltips and testimonials.

There we go so now you can see there is only 1 displayed and you can also do the same thing as with the review plugins if you choose to include the image or not include the image and everything like that.

The actual submit testimonial page again this is really easy, just create a new page in WordPress and I’ve called it submit testimonial, added a line of text and this shortcode here and what that produces is the page to come and submit a testimonial to.

So you may decide to ask people for a testimonial after they’ve bought your product, after they subscribed to your email list maybe after you’ve formed a relationship with them or something like that.

So that is the testimonial plugin, I actually think that’s really sweet I’m going to add it to my main blog as I have been thinking of putting all of the testimonials I have collected to good use and this looks like a really nice way.

So to wrap it up the plugin pack gives you 3 great plugins. If you want a simple way to display reviews just use author hreview.

If you want to transform WordPress into a full blown review platform use the WordPress Reviews plugin and don’t forget the customer testimonials plugin which is great for showing off your achievements.

The plugins will also add the required review rich snippet code so the review stars and your name display in the search results. That’s how I do it folks, see ya!

Click Here To See The Video Transcript

Click Here To Hide The Video Transcript

Resources In The Video

Author Hreview – Add reviews, user reviews, review rich snippets & testimonials to your WordPress blog!

Don’t Like Videos? Follow This Instead!

Today we’re going to talk about how including review sections to your articles will improve your site’s visibility in the search engine results.

Doing this also gives you the option to show reader testimonials and make WordPress your own review platform.

What I Use

The three plugins that come with AuthorHreview which I use are:

AuthorHReview
WordPress Reviews
Customer Testimonials

AuthorHReview is the original plugin that adds the review boxes, WordPress Reviews lets readers submit their own review and Customer Testimonials allows the user to gather testimonials and put them any place on your website to your liking.

Author H Review

This plugin adds a box to your post and it has a some options like adding a date, a name and other things. There is also a widget you can place on your blog with or without an image.

One great thing about this plugin is that you can add it to any article on your website in just a few clicks. You can preview the rich snippet before without the rating and after with the rating. If you’ve set up your Google authorship, the search result will also have your picture.

To set up Author h Review, it has their own menu set up in the WordPress menu. You can hide certain features or add others but your rich snippet will still show the star rating in the search results.

Other options to customize the plugin are the size and alignment of the review box, the style, button color and other details so there is a lot you can do with it to make it fit with your blog!

Adding Author HReview to a post

Let’s actually add a post using the plugin. So add a new post and come down to the review box below the body text.

What you can include:

Star rating
Name of the item you are reviewing
Short review summary
Disclaimer
Price
Version and type of product
Author name

There are three different templates you can choose from, I normally use the default template. There is the option to hide the ratings box on each page, manually place the box by using the shortcode, upload an image, change the text for the button and alignment and establish if the link is follow or not.

So as you can see there are lots of customization options for this plugin. Personally, I like having the box up at the top so it’s easy to see.

Now that’s all set up, let’s see what the published post looks like!

The widget automatically updates itself to add the new review and you can check to see what the rich snippet looks like.

So that is the Author HReview plugin. Now let’s look at WordPress Review for a more advanced review plugin.

WordPress Reviews

WordPress Reviews is a more advanced plugin than the Author HReview, with more features like user reviews and comments.

Readers can send in their own personal reviews of the product and it’ll get added to the comments section.

Another cool thing it lets you do is add the pros and cons of the item and the rich snippet includes all the reviews, including your own and other people’s.

There’s more customization options for website placement or you can drop in the shortcode anywhere.

You can set the reviews with or without a summary or list reviews by tags which is nice if you have more than one product that gives the same service, you can just tag them and people can find it through that.

To set up the plugin, once again it has its own menu and you can just go in there and fill it out to your liking. You can even take out the user reviews if you don’t want that.

To protect your site from spammers, there are a couple options that are easy to set up. You can also hide the rating box and other details like the Author HReview plugin.

Using WP Reviews in a post

Like before, scroll down to the Review settings box and add in the details like name, rating, and summary. Make sure to tick the box that says Enable User Snippets.

If you want, you can fill in the pros and cons. Choose your display settings, add an image and the link. Remember you can always manually insert the review box into individual posts or put it on the top or bottom of the page.

Let’s see what the fully finished WP Review looks like!

Now you can see the text for the price doesn’t fit quite right so just go back in and fix that.

If you want to use just the shortcode, there are two different types that you can use.

The first shortcode says that you want your reviews pulled in chronological order with the images and summaries. The second one is just for five different related reviews. To include images, type “images=yes” or summaries with “summary=yes.”

If you want to show only the most recent reviews, type “recent_review num=1” and add summary or images if you want.

Let’s see how the shortcodes look.

As you can see, the reviews are displayed how I wanted either with summaries or images or without. With the shortcode you can paste it anywhere on your blog: the sidebar menu, beginning or end of posts.

That way people can easily see it and click on it!

In the event that you need more advanced fields for reviewing, you may try Meta Box plugin.

It is an individual WordPress plugin from this package but provides you with a powerful ability to create any kind of fields easily, which may give you more options and ideas.

Customer Testimonials

The last plugin we’re going to go over is the customer testimonials which is pretty handy for collecting different testimonials and putting them together.

There are some neat widgets for displaying the testimonials around your site but the coolest part would have to be the actual submission of them.

There’s a shortcode that creates a form for people to fill out and submit for approval.

form

You can also include the reviews into your rich snippets so that people can see it when it comes up in the search results. Pretty neat!

Now let’s learn how to set it up.

On your dashboard, click on Testimonials in the menu and it’ll take you to all of the testimonials so far with the details such as summary, date, website, etc. I like that it takes the gravatar from the email address so their picture comes up.

If you have some previous testimonials stored away in another place, you can add those and even set up categories for different services.

Under Settings there are more options such as home and front page snippets and SEO.

Displaying the Testimonials

Click Edit Page and you’ll see the testimonials written in code in the box.

You can see that it’s set up to have 3 different views: simple, tooltip and bubble which you can change to whatever you like. To change how many reviews are shown you can just type “num=1” or to however many.

To create the page with the submission form, just create a new page and name it something like Testimonials and paste in the shortcode.

This plug is really a handy tool to have so you can ask people to write a testimonial for you after they’ve subscribed to your mailing list or bought the item you reviewed.

There’s different ways to format it so since I really like this plugin, I’m going to add it to my main blog.

Resources In The Tutorial

Author Hreview – Add reviews, user reviews, review rich snippets & testimonials to your WordPress blog!

Wrapping It Ip

The plugin pack is really nice and you get all three of them so you have plenty of options for displaying reviews and including them in the rich snippets.

You can just do product reviews, turn your WP into a more advanced review platform or gather customer testimonials.

It’s a great way to show yourself off!

90 Responses

Stefani Loia

8.26.2018

Exceptional write-up my buddy. This really is precisely what I‚Äôve been searching for for very a time now. You have my gratitude man

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 27th, 2018 at 10:16 am
  
  Thanks Stefani, glad you found the article.
  
  Reply
Geek Dashboard

5.2.2017

This plugin broke my default comment system.
I purchased the plugin after seeing this review. Once activated, I can not add new comments on my blog.

They are not responding to my tickets, tweets, Facebook messages.
If you are buying this, think twice as they seem not providing any support now.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  May 2nd, 2017 at 4:46 pm
  
  Sorry to hear that, seems like there is a conflict between the theme and the plugin – usually a javascript function name or something like that
  
  Reply
  - Geek Dashboard
    
    May 3rd, 2017 at 12:22 am
    
    It’s not a JS problem. I can not see any errors on the console. Seems something is wrong with PHP functions. It is working fine in PHP 5 but not working in PHP 7.
    
    I purchased their new plugin WP Rich Snippets. It is working fine but my old reviews data is lost. They should have mentioned about the data loss on their website.
    
    and still, they are not responding to my tickets. I’ll not recommend this plugin to anyone.
    
    Reply
David

11.19.2015

Great post, lots to check out (again), but getting “This web page is not available” for the framed section under “Author Hreview Video Review”?

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  November 21st, 2015 at 6:10 pm
  
  Hmm that is just a YouTube video =/
  
  Reply
  - David
    
    November 22nd, 2015 at 4:01 am
    
    my bad! I did try refreshing a couple of times honest! I wasn’t sure what it was but I can see it now thanks, all good
    
    Reply
Ann Castro

11.16.2015

Thanks for sharing this information. Used this plugin on one of my websites and saw positive results. Thanks a ton!

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  November 21st, 2015 at 6:19 pm
  
  Glad it helped you out!
  
  Reply
Jacob

8.19.2015

Is it still possible to “PIMP” Rich snippets with starratings for this plugin? And somewhere in the article you mention: ” If you’ve set up your Google authorship, the search result will also have your picture.” – This phrase you should update, since its not valid anno 2015 – right?

Kind regards – Fan – & thx for a great blog.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 19th, 2015 at 3:48 pm
  
  How do you mean pimp them? This plugin does display the star ratings in serps, do a search for author hreview review
  
  Yes that is right about the authorship
  
  Reply
Mark

8.8.2015

Hi,

Learned new things in making my blog look more cooler,will surely try out these steps and check how well my traffic increases.

Cheers,
Mark

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 10th, 2015 at 12:48 pm
  
  No problem, good luck with your blog :)
  
  Reply
Noman

1.27.2015

Author hReview is a nifty WordPress plugin for adding Google Rich Snippets.I like this plugin very much.thanks for your review

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  January 27th, 2015 at 4:16 pm
  
  no problem :)
  
  Reply
Avishay Biton

12.8.2014

Hi Matthew
Great review and video tutorial
how much seo boost this plugins give ? Google still count that after all the updates in 2014 ?
Thanks Avishay

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  December 11th, 2014 at 2:47 pm
  
  Rich snippets help improve visibility and CTR so a big boost
  
  Reply
Suumit Shah

6.19.2014

Author snippet is really awesome thing, but since last spam removal update, Google has stopped showing my authorship. Which factors they consider to show author pic Matt?

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  June 23rd, 2014 at 1:20 am
  
  I would go with-
  
  1) your not using a picture of a person
  2) you not using a real name
  3) not in many circles
  4) looks spammy
  
  Reply
Ryan Jacob

6.9.2014

I’m using premium version of this plugin. This plugin is really good only one problem – it adds stylesheet and JavaScripts file in header on all pages. It should be like, if plugin is used for that post then only it should add those files otherwise it’ll affect performance of site.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  June 13th, 2014 at 10:51 pm
  
  Drop the developer a mail and see what he says!
  
  Reply
- Hesham
  
  June 23rd, 2014 at 11:11 pm
  
  Hey Ryan,
  
  You are right, I will fix this asap.
  
  Reply
Angela

6.4.2014

I presume you have to download it from the site authorhreview . com ?

As if you look at it from the wordpress plugins page it says

Requires: 3.0 or higher
Compatible up to: 3.5.2
Last Updated: 2012-12-15
Downloads: 31,417

Only compatible up to 3.5.2 !!!
Also I wouldnt recommend anyone use a plugin that is on version 0.0.9.4 – experience should tell most people leave well alone until at least 1.0

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  June 4th, 2014 at 4:20 pm
  
  Works for me on the latest WordPress and I still use it across this blog
  
  Reply
- Hesham
  
  June 4th, 2014 at 11:08 pm
  
  Not sure what this version number means to you, but this is just a number to differentiate plugin updates, this doesn’t mean the plugin is missing something!
  
  The plugin didn’t require an update, and it works with the latest version of WordPress 3.9.1 with no issues.
  
  Reply
Jay

5.7.2014

I am currently using the testimonials plugin on my site with several testimonials created but google search results still do not display the star rating even with a price entered.. Just an excerpt from the trstimonial….

I tried the reviews plugin on one of my other pages and google results showed the star rating right away so I’m not sure what gives!

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  May 9th, 2014 at 4:06 pm
  
  If you use the rich snippet testing tool, does that work ok?
  
  Just because you have the markup, doesn’t automatically mean Google will show it in search results. They clamped down on this after it got spammed/abused
  
  Reply
  - Jay
    
    May 9th, 2014 at 4:47 pm
    
    Yep, the rich snippet testing tool shows everything from star rating to price :)
    
    Reply
    - Matthew Woodward
      
      May 9th, 2014 at 10:26 pm
      
      Then just keep building your authority and Google will reward you in time :)
      
      Reply
Enstine Muki

4.30.2014

Hey Matt,
I’m currently running a contest sponsored by this plugin package. It’s a wonderful 3-in-1 pack

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  May 1st, 2014 at 6:58 am
  
  Glad you like it
  
  Reply
John

4.9.2014

Matthew, Nice plugin!
Is this still a good plugin to use with the latest changes in Google?

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  April 12th, 2014 at 12:22 pm
  
  Yes no problemo
  
  Reply
- Hesham
  
  April 12th, 2014 at 10:23 pm
  
  Just want to let you know that I am fully supporting this plugin with non-stop development :)
  
  Reply
Tetsu

12.29.2013

Nice review Matthew, I tell you, I’m loving your blog more each day. I definitely will be featuring you in a blog post very soon.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  December 29th, 2013 at 5:36 pm
  
  Thanks Tetsu :)
  
  Reply
sankar

12.28.2013

This is really useful plug-in. But, all the features available in pro version only.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  December 29th, 2013 at 5:41 pm
  
  The free one does a good job for most!
  
  Reply
Abhay

11.28.2013

Pro version is best.
I am planning to purchase pro version of author hreview plugin.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  December 1st, 2013 at 1:09 pm
  
  Its a sweet plugin :)
  
  Reply
Conrad

10.11.2013

Hey Matthew,

I found your blog. AWESOME AWESOME CONTENT.

I wanna show my thanks for your AWESOME content by buying Author HReview using your affilate link.

CHING CHING CHING. Commision for you! THANKS AGAIN!

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  October 18th, 2013 at 11:32 am
  
  That’s very kind of you thank you!
  
  Reply
John

9.14.2013

Well that escalated quickly. :o

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  September 16th, 2013 at 9:59 am
  
  Haha always does ^^ premium price requires premium support though
  
  Reply
james

9.6.2013

Just wanted to add and let everyone know that although the plugin is good, the support is downright terrible and Matt, I hope you don’t hide this comment as your readers deserve to know.

Hesham says it comes with 6 months support, but in reality the support forum has a number of posts that just goes unanswered. When someone who had been waiting over 10 days for a reply, Hesham replied’ I chose what posts I reply to, this is my forum”, what kind of attitude is that?

I, myself am still waiting for reply 7 days later, as are many other people. I wouldn’t waste my time with this.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  September 6th, 2013 at 10:53 pm
  
  Hi James,
  
  From what I can gather people that have emailed him directly have had good support but please feel free to post a screenshot of the comments for future reference!
  
  Reply
- Hesham Zebida
  
  September 6th, 2013 at 11:12 pm
  
  I am sorry for your bad experience, but I’ve responded to your emails, and also in the forum. I’ve explained the reason and asked you to wait for your turn (which obviously is my decision, not yours), you instead hijacked other people’s posts and made a miss in the forum.
  
  I don’t welcome this attitude.
  
  Reply
  - Matthew Woodward
    
    September 7th, 2013 at 6:50 pm
    
    I’m going to publish this, but honestly Hesham this comment makes you look pretty bad. The customer is always right my friend.
    
    Reply
    - Hesham Zebida
      
      September 7th, 2013 at 7:23 pm
      
      Thanks for publishing my comment Matthew.
      
      “The customer is always right” is a wrong believe!
      
      That’s only my personal opinion, it’s not the right way to do business my friend.
      
      Reply
      - Matthew Woodward
        
        September 8th, 2013 at 3:07 am
        
        Well no, not always. But if they have paid for something that isn’t working – they choose when you help. As the developer its your responsibility to make sure everything works 110% and there are no compatibility issues etc.
        
        If something isn’t working – that is your fault, no one elses. If your going to charge a premium price you must provide premium support.
        
        My support experience with you was the complete opposite and you were very helpful – please keep that up for everyone.
        
        I’ve seen a bunch of great products go out of business due to poor support/complaints like this so please don’t join that list!
  - Jason Le
    
    September 8th, 2013 at 2:00 pm
    
    That person that hijacked the thread your’re referring to is me.
    
    It was in fact me that was waiting over 10 days with no support.
    I then saw that you replied to someone else that had posted just the day before hence I posted in the same thread asking why I had been waiting 10 days with no support but yet someone else posted 1 day and got a reply the next day, to which you replied that you had been sick and that you decide which support posts to reply to, which I thought was totally not on.
    
    So to suggest that I HIJACKED the thread and insinuate that I caused havoc in the forum is a little misleading.
    
    Also, my reply to your post on the 29th wasn’t answered till the 6th, so in total since my first post asking for help on the 22nd of august, it’s been 15 days and STILL my issue has not been resolved.(Though you have now asked me to email support)
    
    Matt, you own a copy so will have access to the forum look under my username Jasonle and see for yourself.
    
    I had no attitude, I just got fed up with waiting for over 10 days for support. I think you would feel the same if you was in my position
    
    Reply
    - Matthew Woodward
      
      September 8th, 2013 at 2:35 pm
      
      Drop some links/screenshots to the threads
      
      Sorry about your bad experience – I’ll do my best to protect the readers!
      
      Reply
    - Hesham Zebida
      
      September 8th, 2013 at 5:49 pm
      
      Jason, I’ve asked you to email me because you didn’t want to share your site in the forum, I can’t help you if you didn’t send me a link to your site.
      
      So, please just send me an email so I can help you.
      
      Reply
micsten

8.22.2013

Have to say after purchasing this Plugin I’m pretty disappointed.

I have only used the Customer Testimonials section of the plugin (which is what I bought it for). It doesn’t allow you to add dates next to each customer testimonial which is a major flaw as far as I’m concerned.

Also you have to fill out every field when a new testimonial comes through within the CMS – that includes image, website, etc for the reviewer or it won’t show up on the page where you put the shortcode. Even if you have no intention of using those elements.

I visited the support forum and found that several other people had had this issue, but there is no mention of it in the instructions on how to use the plugin – which would have saved me quite a bit of frustration before i managed to find the thread in the Support Forum.

Also it won’t let you add the average score into the site unless you place it as a Widget, which is pretty limiting. Would be much better if it was made so you could add it via some code into the template.

The Customer Testimonials part just feels a little rushed and half-baked.

I have left my suggestions on improvements within the Feature Requests but had no response yet – to be fair I only posted it yesterday.

There is another Customer Reviews Plugin (WP Customer Reviews) that does a similar thing which is free, I had that installed earlier but moved over to this paid version. Sorta wishing I hadn’t bothered now.

Anyway, if people are out there like me looking to buy this due to the Customer Testimonials part I would say buy it under the understanding it still seems to be a work in progress.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 23rd, 2013 at 7:27 am
  
  Hi,
  
  I assume when you downloaded it you saw the beta tag?
  
  I’m using it on the blog here although haven’t deployed the display of them live anywhere yet.
  
  But the date isn’t an issue for me and I’ll be filling out all fields.
  
  No doubt the dev will fix up the bugs and remove the beta status in the near future.
  
  What was wrong with the free plugin you were using? If it aint broke, dont fix it ^^
  
  Reply
  - micsten
    
    August 27th, 2013 at 10:45 am
    
    Hi Matthew,
    
    Here’s hoping the author will iron out those issues soon.
    
    I changed away from using the free option because it wouldn’t let me place an aggregated review score anywhere on the site, which Author hReview does.
    
    I wanted to put that on the homepage, so that the rich snippet in results would show a star rating with ‘out of 304 reviews’ text showing.
    
    Reply
    - Matthew Woodward
      
      September 3rd, 2013 at 7:49 pm
      
      See his response ^^
      
      Reply
- Hesham
  
  August 28th, 2013 at 7:55 am
  
  Sorry to hear that. Let me explain a few points.
  
  * The Customer Testimonials is not a section, it’s a plugin. Also, it’s a bonus plugin that you get for free when you purchase the package, it dose a very special task, so it will get a good care and go out of beta soon. Also, there are a couple of good ideas for the future of this plugin, but I don’t want to burn them out.
  
  I want to make sure that this plugin actually works really well before consider it a production. The only way for me to do so is to actually test it on live sites due to Google indexing and the time it takes…etc. It’s not an easy job and it take a lot of time and testing.
  
  * I never thought of displaying the date because I think it’s not necessary, and no one of my members ever asked for this feature.
  
  * You must fill all fields so that the display gets complete, this is required for shortcodes and widgets to work, or it won’t show in a nice way. So, this is from a design point of view.
  
  * Displaying the average rating by a shortcode is on my to do list.
  
  * You didn’t get a respond in the support forum because I was sick in bed last week (I really apologize for that, but I couldn’t work, it’s just out of my control. I hope you understand). I really appreciate every single suggestion you’ve made.
  
  I hope these points explain.
  
  Reply
  - Matthew Woodward
    
    September 3rd, 2013 at 7:39 pm
    
    From the man himself =D
    
    Reply
Chris

8.22.2013

Hey Matt, everytime i come to your site seems to find something new and interesting. What are you now using for the popular posts thats rotating between social networks

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  September 3rd, 2013 at 10:06 pm
  
  Hi,
  
  That is https://www.matthewwoodward.co.uk/get/topsocialshareposts/
  
  Reply
Sterling

8.21.2013

Woot. Thanks for coupon code. Just got the multi-site license.

Congrats to the winners!

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  September 4th, 2013 at 12:50 am
  
  No worrys :)
  
  Reply
MixerDJ

8.20.2013

Congratz winners and f*ck my luck :D

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 21st, 2013 at 6:18 pm
  
  There are better things to fuck
  
  Reply
David

8.6.2013

Hi Matthew,

Does the plugin work also for pages, not only posts?

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 8th, 2013 at 11:35 am
  
  Only for posts sorry =\
  
  Reply
- Hesham
  
  August 28th, 2013 at 7:36 am
  
  Just a small correction, the Author hReview and WP Reviews plugins works on posts, pages, and custom post types.
  
  Reply
  - Matthew Woodward
    
    September 3rd, 2013 at 7:39 pm
    
    ^^
    
    Reply
Rudd

8.4.2013

Awesome, just in time. I’m looking for a plugin that allows me to add the right snippet for reviews in my site. Hope to win the pro version. The free or lite version is good, but the premium version offers lots more great features.

I’m in

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 8th, 2013 at 11:38 am
  
  Good luck =D
  
  Reply
Umee

8.3.2013

I am in… ;)

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 3rd, 2013 at 8:58 am
  
  Good luck =D
  
  Reply
John Diginee

8.2.2013

Mehn, I’m gonna win this stuff

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 3rd, 2013 at 8:58 am
  
  ^^
  
  Reply
Ian Wilcox

8.2.2013

Ohh sweet! another awesome competition! thanks matt and good luck to everyone… fingers crossed!

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 2nd, 2013 at 1:59 pm
  
  Here we go again ^^
  
  Reply
MixerDJ

8.2.2013

Ohh I hope this time I’ll get Luck I’m in Matthew :D

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 3rd, 2013 at 8:59 am
  
  Gooooood luck =D
  
  Reply
tiroberts

8.2.2013

Ah, ha! I KNEW I’d seen you around before I’d received Ehsan’s email about your “how to create a blog” tutorial.

Aleks had pint us against each other in his SEO vs. Social media traffic comparison post. LOL.

Yup, contrary to his post it seems as though our blogging and traffic generation tactics are very similar rather than different, even the way we create our case studies. Although I prefer your template and will be possibly be remodeling mine after yours.

Awesome competition and review, Matt. I’ve always wondered how bloggers got those neat review boxes to sit so nicely in their sidebars. Now I know!

I’ve entered your competition; hopefully I’ll win.

Anywho, I’m off to purchase that neat social lock plugin you mentioned in your income report. It’ just the thing I need for my upcoming blog post/tutorial next week.

And, of course, I’m purchasing through your affiliate link. ;)

Enjoy your vacation, my friend; Cheers!

Ti

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 3rd, 2013 at 9:00 am
  
  HI Ti,
  
  Thats very kind of you thanks =D I haven’t actually looked around your blog yet – not even had time to eat this past week lol but I’ll get round to it =D
  
  Fancy dropping me an email with your best posts?
  
  Reply
Ryan @ Trusted Site Seller

8.2.2013

I entered Matthew. Looks like it could be pretty useful for number of my properties. Crossing my fingers.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 3rd, 2013 at 9:01 am
  
  Good luck Ryan
  
  Reply
Vincent

8.2.2013

Entered! Man, I hope history doesn’t repeat itself (Matt knows what I mean.)

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 2nd, 2013 at 4:57 pm
  
  Hahaha better luck this time ^^
  
  Reply
Casey D

8.2.2013

Damn, this is awesome Matt! Hope I win..

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 2nd, 2013 at 1:59 pm
  
  Good luck =D
  
  Reply
Gerard McMullan

8.2.2013

its a great plugin Matt, i bought it a few weeks back and its already tripled my conversions. i still need to do a bit of tweaking but so far its money well spent.

Reply
- Matthew Woodward
  
  August 2nd, 2013 at 1:59 pm
  
  Glad to hear it – I’ve not found anything else like it!
  
  Reply