Inside Search
The official Google Search blog
Getting started with structured data
May 30, 2013
When Google understands a website’s content in a structured way, we can present that content more accurately and more attractively in search. For example, our algorithms can enhance search results with “
rich snippets
” when we understand that a page contains an event, recipe, product, review, or similar. We can also feature a page’s data as part of answers in search from the
Knowledge Graph
or in
Google Now
cards, helping you find the right information at just the right time.
Starting today, webmasters have two new tools that make it simpler than ever before to provide the structured content of their web pages. The first is an expansion of
Data Highlighter
to eight types of structured data:
events
,
products
,
local businesses
,
articles
,
software applications
,
movies
,
restaurants
, and
TV episodes
. With Data Highlighter, webmasters don’t even need to change their site’s HTML. Instead, they can just point and click with their mouse to “tag” the key fields on a few sample pages of their site. Google learns the pattern of the fields and applies it to similar pages on the site, so all their information can be understood.
The second tool,
Structured Data Markup Helper
, is for web authors who are ready to take the next step and embed structured data directly within their pages, so their content is available to everyone. As with Data Highlighter, one simply points and clicks on a sample web page to indicate its key data fields. Structured Data Markup Helper then shows exactly what microdata annotations to add to the page’s HTML code. We hope this helps give HTML authors a running start with adding structured data to their sites, in turn making search results more meaningful.
To learn more, please see our post on the
Webmaster Central blog
!
Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager
Rich Snippet Instructional Videos
December 16, 2011
(
cross-posted to the
Webmaster Central Blog
)
When users come to Google, they have a pretty good idea of what they’re looking for, but they need help deciding which result might have the information that best suits their needs. So, the challenge for Google is to make it very clear to our users what content exists on a page in both a useful and concise manner. That’s one reason we have
rich snippets
.
Essentially, rich snippets provide you with the ability to help Google highlight aspects of your page. Whether your site contains information about products, recipes, events or apps, a few simple additions to your markup can result in more engagement with your content -- and potentially more traffic to your site.
To help you get started or fine tune your rich snippets, we’ve put together a
series of tutorial videos
for webmasters of all experience levels. These videos provide guidance as you mark up your site so that Google is better able to understand your content. We can use that content to power the rich snippets we display for your pages. Check out the videos below to get started:
For more information on how to use rich snippets markup for your site, visit our
Help Center
.
Posted by
Alejandro Goyen
, Product Manager
Clicks and impressions for authors
December 14, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Webmaster Central Blog
)
With the latest
improvements to the way authorship annotations look
in search and the
addition of authorship to Google News
, authors have been really excited about getting more visibility, and users benefit from seeing the name, photo, and way to connect with the person who created the content.
Authors have also been giving us a lot of feedback on what else they'd like to see, so today we're introducing “Author Stats” in
Webmaster Tools
that shows you how often your content is showing up on the Google search results page. If you associate your content with your Google Profile either via
e-mail verification
or
a simple link
, you can visit Webmaster Tools to see how many impressions and clicks your content got on the Google search results page. Check out what Matt Cutts would see for his content:
To see your information, go to
google.com/webmasters
and login with the same username you use for your Google+ Profile. On the left hand panel, you can see “Author Stats” under the “Labs” section. This is an experimental feature so we’re continuing to iterate and improve, but we wanted to get early feedback from you. You can e-mail us at
authorship-pilot@google.com
if you run into any issues or have feedback.
If you’re a content creator interested in learning more about authorship,
check out our Help Center
.
Posted by
Javier Tordable
, Software Engineer
Powering a new job search engine for military veterans
November 7, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
and the
Public Policy blog
)
Earlier today, President Obama spoke about the importance of
helping returning military veterans find work
. Thousands of businesses have committed to hiring military veterans and families and as part of this nationwide effort, starting today, job seekers can visit the
National Resource Directory
(NRD) to search more than 500,000 job openings from employers around the country.
We have been working with the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to provide a customized job search engine for the NRD, using
Google Custom Search
technology. This custom search engine uses the power and scale of Google search to constantly crawl the web, looking for
JobPosting markup
from
Schema.org
on sites like
simplyhired.com
to identify veteran-committed job openings. An employer can easily add a job posting to NRD simply by adding that markup to their own web page. As pages are updated or removed from the web, they’re automatically updated and removed from the system, keeping the available job postings on NRD fresh and up to date.
If you’re an employer, you can find
more information
on how to participate on
nationalresourcedirectory.gov
. In addition, organizations such as local veterans' groups can help people find jobs by adding a veteran-committed jobs
search box
to their websites.
We’re happy to contribute to this important initiative and hope businesses use this opportunity to connect with veterans seeking employment.
Posted by
Christina Chen
, Product Manager, Search
Find more information about applications with rich snippets
September 14, 2011
We've previously
introduced rich snippets
for reviews, video, events, and most recently
music
, to help people determine more quickly if a particular webpage has the information they're interested in.
Before you install a software application, you may want to check out what others think about it and how much it costs. Starting today, you’ll be able to get information about the applications, including review and price information, right in your search results.
Here's an example of what the snippets look like:
You can see application snippets from several marketplaces and review sites, including
Android Market
,
Apple iTunes
, and
CNET
. If you’re a webmaster and would like more information about how to add the application rich snippets markup to your site, please refer to our
Help Center article
and send any questions to our
discussion forum
.
Posted by
Alejandro Goyen
, Product Manager
Rich snippets help you find music more easily
August 18, 2011
Starting today, when you search for music, you may see songs that are available for you to play in the snippets of certain search results. Up until now, it’s been easy to find information about musical artists, such as their biographies, pictures from the latest awards ceremony, or recent related news items. However, it’s been comparatively harder to find audio recordings of an artist’s songs. When you’re looking at a results page, it’s not obvious which pages will have songs or samples of music that you can listen to.
We've previously
introduced rich snippets
for reviews, video, and events to help people determine more quickly if a particular webpage has the information they're interested in. Today we’re introducing rich snippets for music. Now when you search for an artist or album, certain sites that have implemented the new
rich snippets markup for music
will show up to four songs in their snippet on the results page.
The snippet will display the name of the song, whether it’s audio or video, the duration of the clip, and the album it’s from. Even better, the song title itself will act as a link to the site’s specific page for that song, so that if you know you just want to hear one particular thing, music rich snippets can get you straight there.
Content providers looking to have their sites display music rich snippets can take a look at our
blog post on the
Google Webmaster Central blog
explaining how to get started. The
rich snippets testing tool
will allow you to test your markup and see how it would appear on Google.
We hope that this will be the first step towards making audio content easier for you to find and easier for sites to surface. You can currently see audio clips on the results page from several partners who have used the rich snippets markup for music, including MySpace, Rhapsody and ReverbNation. For instance, if you search for [
gipsy kings
] or [
kelly clarkson
], you’ll see some of the songs they have available to play right there on the results page. We’ll continue to work with more content providers to make sure you can always find the music you’re looking for.
Posted by
Gideon Wald
, Associate Product Manager
Authorship markup and web search
June 7, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Webmaster Central Blog
)
Today we're beginning to support authorship markup -- a way to connect authors with their content on the web. We are experimenting with using this data to help people find content from great authors in our search results.
We now support markup that enables websites to publicly link within their site from content to author pages. For example, if an author at The New York Times has written dozens of articles, using this markup, the webmaster can connect these articles with a New York Times author page. An author page describes and identifies the author, and can include things like the author’s bio, photo, articles and other links.
If you run a website with authored content, you’ll want to learn about authorship markup in our
help center
. The markup uses existing standards such as HTML5 (rel=”author”) and XFN (rel=”me”) to enable search engines and other web services to identify works by the same author across the web. If you're already doing structured data markup using
microdata from schema.org
, we'll interpret that authorship information as well.
We wanted to make sure the markup was as easy to implement as possible. To that end, we’ve already worked with several sites to markup their pages, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNET, Entertainment Weekly, The New Yorker and others. In addition, we’ve taken the extra step to add this markup to everything hosted by YouTube and Blogger. In the future, both platforms will automatically include this markup when you publish content.
We know that great content comes from great authors, and we’re looking closely at ways this markup could help us highlight authors and rank search results.
Posted by Othar Hansson, Software Engineer
Introducing schema.org: Search engines come together for a richer web
June 2, 2011
(Cross-posted on the
Official Google Blog
)
Today we’re announcing
schema.org
, a new initiative from Google, Bing and Yahoo! to create and support a common vocabulary for structured data markup on web pages. With
schema.org
, site owners and developers can learn about structured data and improve how their sites appear in major search engines. The site aims to be a one stop resource for webmasters looking to add markup to their pages.
Search engines have been working independently to support structured markup for a few years now. We
introduced rich snippets
to Google search in 2009 to help people find better summaries of
reviews
and
people
, and since that time we’ve expanded to new kinds of rich snippets, including
recipes
and
events
. We’ve been thrilled to see content creators across the web—from
stubhub.com
to
allrecipes.com
—add markup to their pages, and today we’re able to show rich snippets in search results more than 10 times as often as when we started two years ago.
We want to continue making the open web richer and more useful. We know that it takes time and effort for webmasters to add this markup to their pages, and adding markup is much harder if every search engine asks for data in a different way. That’s why we’ve come together with other search engines to support a common set of schemas, just as we came together to support a common standard for sitemaps in 2006. With
schema.org
, site owners can improve how their sites appear in search results not only on Google, but on Bing, Yahoo! and potentially other search engines as well in the future.
In addition to consolidating the schemas for the categories we already support,
schema.org
also introduces schemas for more than a hundred new categories, including movies, music, organizations, TV shows, products, places and more. As webmasters add this markup to their sites, search engines can develop richer search experiences. With webmaster feedback, we’ll be able to regularly publish new schemas for sites to use and, in turn, expand the list of queries with rich results. For webmasters who have already added microformats or RDFa currently supported by rich snippets, their sites will still appear with rich snippets on Google. You can learn more on our
Webmaster Central Blog
,
Help Center
and on
schema.org
.
Schema.org provides a wide variety of vocabularies webmasters can use to mark up their pages.
While this collaborative initiative is new, we draw heavily from the decades of work in the database and knowledge representation communities, from projects such as Jim Gray’s
SDSS Skyserver
,
Cyc
and from ongoing efforts such as
dbpedia.org
and
linked data
. We feel privileged to build upon this great work.
We look forward to seeing structured markup continue to grow on the web, powering richer search results and new kinds of applications.
Posted by Ramanathan Guha, Google Fellow
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