Microdata support for Rich Snippets

Friday, March 12, 2010

HTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5
specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying
structured information within web pages.

Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in
rich snippets
in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your
web pages, you can specify
reviews,
people profiles,
or
events
information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in
Google search results.

Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of
“L’Amourita Pizza”

:

Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author
and date of the review, and the rating:

Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy
to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a
new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and
itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page,
you can test it using the
rich snippets testing tool
to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.

As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support—including which item types
and item properties are understood by Google—is specified in our rich snippets documentation
as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich
snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to
ensure a great user experience.

To get started, here are some helpful links:

• Rich snippets documentation
• Overview of microdata
• Official microdata specification
• Rich snippets testing tool

Written by Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Kavi Goel, Ramanathan V. Guha, Pravir Gupta, Othar Hansson