Wednesday, December 12, 2012 at 9:09 AM
Webmaster Level: All
At Google we're making more and more use of structured data to provide enhanced search results, such as rich snippets and event calendars, that help users find your content. Until now, marking up your site's HTML code has been the only way to indicate structured data to Google. However, we recognize that markup may be hard for some websites to deploy.
Today, we're offering webmasters a simpler alternative: Data Highlighter. At initial launch, it's available in English only and for structured data about events, such as concerts, sporting events, exhibitions, shows, and festivals. We'll make Data Highlighter available for more languages and data types in the months ahead.
Data Highlighter is a point-and-click tool that can be used by anyone authorized for your site in Google Webmaster Tools. No changes to HTML code are required. Instead, you just use your mouse to highlight and "tag" each key piece of data on a typical event page of your website:
If your page lists multiple events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will "learn" that format as you apply tags, and help speed your work by automatically suggesting additional tags. Likewise, if you have many pages of events in a consistent format, Data Highlighter will walk you through a process of tagging a few example pages so it can learn about their format variations. Usually, 5 or 10 manually tagged pages are enough for our sophisticated machine-learning algorithms to understand the other, similar pages on your site.
When you're done, you can review a sample of all the event data that Data Highlighter now understands. If it's correct, click "Publish."
From then on, as Google crawls your site, it will recognize your latest event listings and make them eligible for enhanced search results. You can inspect the crawled data on the Structured Data Dashboard, and unpublish at any time if you're not happy with the results.
Here’s a short video explaining how the process works:
To get started with Data Highlighter, visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".
If you have any questions, please read our Help Center article or ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum. Happy Highlighting!
23 comments:
This looks VERY useful. I am finding it quite problematic hand-coding this stuff.
Hi, will Data Highlighter support subdomains? I get an error message "URL must begin with www.x.com" when using our subdomain, which has all our important event links.
Awesome!
Good one.
Thank you i am using this.
Doesn't seem to be available in Germany yet ;( :(
IT's incredibly awesome...and even more easy then HTML markup.
Not even in french :(
Thank you Google! This is absolutely fantastic! Kudos to the team that came up with this. Saves a million hours if you're working on a massive website!
In the sphere of events, this means that if your site has multiple, similarly structured pages containing event data, you can highlight event ... DB Mall
Hi, Good feature. Getting error "URL must begin with http://www.domain.com. Does it not support https? or what could be the issue? Thanks
Was there really need of it? since it's not gonna help for other major search engines (Bing and Yahoo). Rich Snippets with Schema.org supports all 3 Major search engines.
I wonder how we can make the use of this on a site like this one.
@Tony Accurso and @EMA Webmasters: Can you post in the forums details of when you're seeing that error message?
Also, can you confirm that the subdomain or HTTPS site you're seeing this message for is verified in Webmaster Tools and you're trying to highlight data through the site's Webmaster Tools account?
Our forums: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/structured-data
Thanks,
Pierre
Looks very promising. I also had URL difficulties which I posted to the Structured Data forum.
great .. Google helping us a lot in it....
I found it so useful, good addition there. I am hoping more features will be added way too soon.
Absolutely easy and very user friendly, already added and waiting to see the appearance
Very user friendly and innovative. One problem I'm having is selecting a date range from a drop down box. Is this not possible?
vary useful tool for web masters.
Thanks again Google, this is really useful and is a nice short cut to dispense of some code
thanks for sharing..big help for my website
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