WordPress Plugin GD Star Rating Problem – 5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating

The recent update to GD Star rating WordPress plugin started to show “5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating” text in the posts.

This is really annoying. Thousands of blogs which are using this plugin started to show up this text inside the posts. Showing up is not a big problem but Google crawling it and showing up in the search results is a real cause of concern.

Type this “5.0 out of 5 based on 1 rating” in the Google search and see what the result shows up. A bunch of blogs posts which are using GD star Rating plugin which shows this text.

WordPress support forum also remains quiet as most of the blogger don’t bother about it thinking that it will not cause any problem. It doesn’t cause a problem but it certainly dilutes your text content and degrades the SEO worthiness of your content up to some extent.

Solution

This text is basically a microformat text which is not supposed to show up in the blog post. It is shown to Google.

The solution is to comment out the code in the plugin file which shows this code.

In file /wp-content/plugins/gd-star-rating/gdragon/gd_google.php comment out the lines starting from 113 as shown below

You can see this fix working on this blog itself. Scroll down and you will not see the problem below this post.