Thursday, March 11, 2010 at 5:51 PM
Webmaster Level: AllHTML5 is the fifth major revision of HTML, the core language of the World Wide Web. The HTML5 specification includes a description of microdata, a new markup standard for specifying structured information within web pages.
Today, we’re happy to announce support for microdata for use in rich snippets in addition to our existing support for microformats and RDFa. By using microdata markup in your web pages, you can specify reviews, people profiles, or events information on your web pages that Google may use to improve the presentation of your pages in Google search results.
Here is a simple HTML block showing a section of a review of “L’Amourita Pizza”:
Here is the same HTML with microdata added to specify the restaurant being reviewed, the author and date of the review, and the rating:
Microdata has the nice property of balancing richness with simplicity. As you can see, it’s easy to add markup to your pages using a few HTML attributes like itemscope (to define a new item), itemtype (to specify the type of item being described), and itemprop (to specify a property of that item). Once you’ve added markup to a page, you can test it using the rich snippets testing tool to make sure that Google can parse the data on your page.
As with microformats and RDFa, the vocabulary that we support -- including which item types and item properties are understood by Google -- is specified in our rich snippets documentation as well as on data-vocabulary.org. Marking up your content does not guarantee that rich snippets will show for your site; Google will expand the use of microdata markup gradually to ensure a great user experience.
To get started, here are some helpful links:
- Rich snippets documentation
- Overview of microdata
- Official microdata specification
- Rich snippets testing tool
19 comments:
In the first div, you have the "itemscope" attribute all by itself with no value. Aren't all attributes supposed to have values? For instance:
<option selected="selected">foo</option>
No, <option selected>foo</option> is fine in HTML.
Oh, sorry guess it is, I'm just so used to people using XHTML where it is illegal.
http://www.w3schools.com/Xhtml/xhtml_syntax.asp
What is the correct code above for XHTML?
is it itemscope="itemscope"
Either itemscope="" or itemscope="itemscope" is correct for XHTML.
at the end of the first organization microdata example there are 2 syntax mistakes:
<-a href="http://www.example.com" itemprop="url"->http://pizza.example.com<-/span->.
<-/span->
The first /span should probably be an /a, the second one is unnecessary.
Google Article
I'm looking for review sites where the testing tool could give good results.
Looks like micordata is not used much yet. Sadly.
When this feature will be available in all countries?
It looks like it could be abused. What is to stop people coding up 5 stars all the time?
Thanks, your_admin! It should be appearing updated in a few minutes.
What's the advantage, if any, to using HTML 5's microdata over microformats?
After 3 months, we continue to wait patiently to see whether Google will decide to display our microformats in their search results: example one, example two.
When will non-english websites show rich snippets? It is frustrating seeing us-sites in non-us serps with rich snippets.
How many people will take a look at this blog? http://www.jewelrywholesale-cn.com/
Google is difficult to understand in some way. jewelry wholesale
As we are the largest speed dating company in Europe, running more events than anyone else, we thought that Google extending rich snippets for events would be ideal for us so we have implemented it at http://www.slowdating.com/events.aspx - it's not displaying yet though - so I wonder if there is a human approval process, and if so, could you please do the honours :) ?
@carl There is a human approval process. You need to fill out this form: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/request.py?contact_type=rich_snippets_feedback
Hi,
I hear an agency who said that they have a partnership with google for uploading a feed with reviews and it's not necessary to add microdata in code.
Is that possible?
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