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

(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

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:

(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

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

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

(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

(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.


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