Help us make the web better: An update on Rich Snippets

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
или
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.

Written by Kavi Goel, Pravir Gupta, and Othar Hansson