Monday, October 26, 2009
In May this year we announced Rich Snippets which makes it possible to show structured data from your pages on Google's search results.
We're convinced that structured data makes the web better, and we've worked hard to expand Rich Snippets to more search results and collect your feedback along the way. If you have review or people/social networking content on your site, it's easier than ever to mark up your content using microformats or RDFa so that Google can better understand it to generate useful Rich Snippets. Here are a few helpful improvements on our end to enable you to mark up your content:
Testing tool
See what Google is able to extract, and preview how microformats or RDFa marked-up pages would look on Google search results. Test your URLs on the Rich Snippets Testing Tool.
Google Custom Search users can also use the Rich Snippets Testing Tool to test markup usable in their Custom Search engine.
Better documentation
We've extended our documentation to include a new section containing Tips and Tricks and Frequently Asked Questions. Here we have responded to common points of confusion and provided instructions on how to maximize the chances of getting Rich Snippets for your site.
Extended RDFa support
In addition to the Person RDFa format, we have added support for the corresponding fields from the FOAF and vCard vocabularies for all those of you who asked for it.
Videos
If you have videos on your page, you can now mark up your content to help Google find those videos.
As before, marking up your content does not guarantee that Rich Snippets will be shown for your site. We will continue to expand this feature gradually to ensure a great user experience whenever Rich Snippets are shown in search results.