Rich snippets go international

Monday, April 26, 2010

As part of our efforts to make search results more useful to our users around the world, we’re
announcing the international availability of
rich
snippets. If you’ve been following our blog posts, you already know that rich snippets let
users see additional facts and data from your site in search results.

For example, we recently launched
rich snippets for recipes
which, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet and makes it
easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for:

We’ve had a lot of questions on our blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets
– and we know that many of you have already started marking up your content – so today’s
announcement is very exciting for us.

In addition to adding support for rich snippets in any language, we have published
documentation
on how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in the following languages: simplified Chinese,
traditional Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean,
Polish, Portuguese, Russian, pish, and Turkish. (You can change the Help language by scrolling
to the bottom of the help page and selecting the language you want from the drop-down menu.)

We encourage you to read the documentation to take advantage of the different types of rich
snippets currently supported:
people profiles,
reviews,
videos,
events
and
recipes. You can also use our
testing tool
(in English only, but useful to test markup in any language) and start validating your markup to
make sure results show as you would expect.

Finally and as you’ve probably heard by now (several times), we’re taking a gradual approach to
surface rich snippets. This means that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that we’ll show
rich snippets for your pages. We’re doing this to ensure a good experience for our users; but
rest assured we’re working hard to expand coverage and include more web pages.

Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Yu Watanabe