Friday, January 22, 2010 at 10:20 AM
Webmaster Level: AllLast year we introduced Rich Snippets, a new feature that makes it possible to surface structured data from your pages on Google's search results. So far, user reaction to Rich Snippets has been enthusiastic -- after all, Rich Snippets help people make more informed clicks and find what they need even faster.
We originally introduced Rich Snippets with two formats: reviews and people. Later in the year we added support for marking up video information which is used to improve Video Search. Today, we're excited to kick off the new year by adding support for events.
Events markup is based off of the hCalendar microformat. Here's an example of what the new events Rich Snippets will look like:
The new format shows links to specific events on the page along with dates and locations. It provides a fast and convenient way for users to determine if a page has events they may be interested in.
If you have event listings on your site, we encourage you to review the events documentation we've prepared to help you get started. Please note, however, that marking up your content is not a guarantee that Rich Snippets will show for your site. Just as we did for previous formats, we will take a gradual approach to incorporating the new event snippets to ensure a great user experience along the way.
Stay tuned for more developments in Rich Snippets throughout the year!
39 comments:
Cant wait to see this in action!
I love this rich Snippets!
Yep, ok, this is good.
Though by definition, events are time-sensitive.
What sort of granularity is supposed by the mining of these?
If the details of an event change, can the mining be re-triggered?
paradisaeidae
I don't like it it takes to long to look at.
Regards
Darius
-------------------
Signature
survey site reviews
No RDFa in your page. Are microformats preferred by Google ?
Renaud JOLY - SEO Manager
This is really cool
Yes!!
This is really good.
http://mostvisitedbloginasia.blogspot.com/
I had a problem with pages not being indexed properly after I added microformats to people's names. I posted about it here: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Webmasters/thread?tid=67cb21ccb8e204e0&hl=en
Great Movement by Google Team
This is good, i can see many new improvements in google search... it is changing day by day... Users have to update their knowledge faster...
Great work Google -Nitin and Mike. One less click going forward.
A great idea - slightly annoying that the attributes are added via css classes. It means these can@t be applied in conjunction with IE8 slices. I suppose any other bespoke attributes would invalidate HTML. Either way, I'll be recommending to clients - more links in the SERPs is not to be sneezed at.
This is very nice, and very usefull e.g. to see at what time that blockbuster movie is launching in a theater near you.
But when does Google launch this in more countries? We've put the needed tags for review-rich-snippets in our Dutch website, but we don't see a result.
Does Google has more information about the launch of this great add-on in other countries besides the US ?
I don't understand. Why would anyone want to use Rich Snippets and have Google pull more content from their site? Wouldn't this cause less click through from Google to our websites? My thinking is a BIG YES.
This is awesome.
I like the fact that I can quickly go to a venue like the example and see a top list of events easily via Google experience.
WTG G!
This is great! I have some questions after trying to implement it and am wondering how to test/verify.
In particular, how can one include the vcard address details but prevent them from displaying? I reserve the venue, address, etc for the actual event pages and dont want to add that to the summary listings .. yet it says the details will only be read from multi-event listing pages.
Also will the ISO dates parse OK without start times?
thanks!
great google
Great, we're implementing this for our courses right away.
Microformats are the future :-)
other questions: who can we contact with questions?
From what Matt Cutts said, sites will initially be hand-approved. Is there someone we should ping to let them know we have these implemented?
@markt Wouldn't that depend on the site? I understand bigger sites get crawled more often by Google than the smaller ones. MicroFormats don't change this, unless Google decides to specifically crawl those sites more often or something.
See the FAQ: http://knol.google.com/k/google-rich-snippets-tips-and-tricks#Frequently_Asked_Questions Fill in the form mentioned there to request rich snippet support.
Beforehand you can test your rich snippet supported MicroFormats here: http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets
Although events are time sensitive, dates themselves are obviously fixed in time. Only if and event gets moved or dropped completely Google could show outdated info. On that topic, where is the year? It's nice to know an event is on the 23rd of January, but when? For all the snippet tells me it was last year, or maybe next. It does mention "Saturday", so I could look it up manually and limit the options, but that's hardly user friendly. :)
@sammuello The hCalendar is an established standard, so supporting it makes sense. I only remembered Web Slices after I looked them up. Not sure what the problem is; overlapping/clashing class names? I'll read http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc304073%28VS.85%29.aspx later since I'm curious.
@gruvr You can use CSS to hide stuff, although the MicroFormats people say you shouldn't, and I think Google doesn't like it either. At least the other rich snippet documentation says it won't support rich snippets for your site if you hide stuff, since it could be misleading people. It doesn't matter unless you think you can get Google to support your site.
@retodon8 thanks.. to clarify what I asked - google suggested and gave an example using the 'value-class' pattern for "geo" data, which hides lat/lon from appearing.
They said "To represent dates and geo information in a machine-readable way without changing their presentation on the page, you can use the microformats value class pattern".
Okay - but does that mean you can use value-class on data besides dates & geo ? Without triggering some 'invisible data' penalty (which could cost you your livelihood, despite your good intention...!)
HI
is there any differnce in cptcha and recaptcha??
Please suggest?? which one more powerfull???
Not bad at all. I want to see how it will be implemented also in Romania.
I really think it's the wrong way to improve search results. Content structure shouldn't depend on a search provider's interpretation of the content. Like the idea of separating presentation and content...
@gruvr Google's explanation for the pattern seems to be different from from I read on the official uFs (MicroFormats) site:
http://microformats.org/wiki/value-class-pattern
From what I understand from the uFs site, the pattern was invented so we could add human readable text to our uFs without confusing computer parsers. It doesn't have anything to do with hiding the computer readable date. Like I said, the uFs people discourage hiding. The example given in the link above has a {span class="value"} containing the computer readable data, which you would have to hide using CSS "display:none" as seen here:
http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_display_visibility.asp
However in Google's example the computer readable date is put in HTML tag parameters by default not shown to human visitors. I guess there may simply be 2 valid methods, but I'd have to do some research. Anyway, the "Google way" basically "hides" the computer readable data, which I think is what you want, so I they shouldn't penalize anyone for doing that. I can't seem to find where I read about that any more...
@Mystery shopper When scanning and spellchecking paper documents there are often words computers cannot decipher using OCR. Humans (website visitors) are offered that word next to a CAPTCHA word. The human visitor doesn't know which word is the real CAPTCHA, and has to type both. The other word is now used to complete the earlier scan, and the ReCAPTCHA served its second function. Since the computer doesn't know what the word was, it cannot be used to verify the visitor is human, so ReCAPTCHAs aren't any more/less powerful than regular ones. (Sometimes you can tell which words are the unreadable-by-computer ones because there are commas, periods, or things like that in them.) Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReCAPTCHA
@Brian Søgaard MicroFormats are a (more or less) established standard understood by a bunch of different programs. It has nothing to do with Google's interpretation; rather the opposite. uFs are about semantically marking up content to be understood by any program, and not just search engines either. Rich Snippets are only Google's way of presenting that data.
Anyone know if this supports RDFa?
Thank you so much for all the information. These will surely be a great help.
I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog. I will keep visiting this blog very often.
Alena
http://dataentryjob-s.com
hmm.. can you plz tell me when all the snippets will work in others languages than english? i have a feeling it is not implemented in every language.. or..am i wrong
Does this feature distinguish between past and upcoming events?
Great, it definitely saves time to find right event to users. Hopefully Rich Snippets will expand over 2010 to other types of info. It would benefit e-commerce with example special offers/sales and so on
How do we make sure Rich Snippets are visible for our website www.instantsandbags.com - thanks for any advice.
Every year we Bangladeshis celebrate the February 21 as Mother Language Day. And for the last few years the 21st February has been treated as International Mother Language Day announced by the UN. So we will be very much happy and feel proud of Google Web Site if they introduce a picture or theme making with Bengali Language on coming 21st February every year.
Thanks to Google Team..
Amimul Ehsan.
amimulehsan@gmail.com; ehsan@partex.net
We have a review site with very large numbers of reviews - we've marked it up properly and told Google, but the Rich Snippets data isn't showing.
How do we know whether Google intends to add the Rich Snippets, and how long it might take?
we've taken the trouble to mark up the Rich Snippets (and told Google), how do we find out if Google will acknowledge our Snippets?
We're telling all our customers that this is great for their sites - where they contain genuine independent reviews. It would be sad if they all put in the work for nothing.
I think it would be quite useful to have snippets for games. Are you planning to introduce snippets for games or similar snippets?
175 marked up pages, 15 years on the Internet
What else can we do to get Google to display our site with Rich Snippets data?
http://icuban.com/food/index.html
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
Thanks and take care,
The Webmaster Central Team
Post a Comment