Using structured data for reviews - for negative or warnings.

[RobertFisher]

We all use review markup today and we use it linearly as only a vote up or down. My question is around a site that will judge the negative impacts of given chemicals introduced into certain waterways. (Sorry, I must protect the client so I cannot give out all the info; I hope this is enough for a reasonable understanding.)

Is there anyone who has ever used or is aware of any markup that does not result in a star? So, if we use the current system, we end up where a bad chemical gets a ton of single stars. In essence what we are measuring is degrees of Positive. With four stars there is no zero positive, but 25%, 50%, 75%, and 100% (Ok unless it is aggregated).

I want to be able to show degrees of negative and obviously stars would be confusing. So, have a symbol that connotes a negative (skull and crossbones, X, !!, etc.) and the more of these someone marks shows more displeasure or more danger. Are there any ideas for this or any occurrences already on the Internet you may be aware of?

Preference would be to be able to at some point have search engines show them as snippets.

Thanks to all you Mozzers,

Robert

[fabioricotta-84038]

Hi Robert,

Have you try special characters on meta description? Instead of showing the first 5 letters on your meta description, you can use something like this character "" to represent your review about it. Does it work?

You can find the complete list of UTF-8 symbols here: http://www.w3schools.com/charsets/ref_utf_symbols.asp

[RobertFisher]

Hello Fabioricotta

Thanks for the well thought out answer. If we were individually coding each review that would work but we are working with a lot of searcher generated reviews and wanted something that would be recognized by the search engines as well for the review. 
I do give you credit for great thinking on this though! Thanks a ton. (Sorry, I went dark for about 10 days and did not answer back.)

Robert

[Everett]

Hello Robert,

That I know of there is no micro-data markup for your specific need. However, you should be able to use the review rating for now. You can show the skull and crossbones or happy faces or whatever you need to show to the user, and then use the Rating or AggregateRating schema to translate that into what Google needs, which is essentially a number range from 1-5. These would show up as starts in the SERPs, but you could show them with whatever icons you like on your website.