Thursday, September 02, 2010 at 4:57 PM
Webmaster Level: AllSince the initial roll-out of rich snippets in 2009, webmasters have shown a great deal of interest in adding markup to their web pages to improve their listings in search results. When webmasters add markup using microdata, microformats, or RDFa, Google is able to understand the content on web pages and show search result snippets that better convey the information on the page. Thanks to steady adoption by webmasters, we now see more than twice as many searches with rich snippets in the results in the US, and a four-fold increase globally, compared to one year ago. Here are three recent product updates.
Testing tool improvements
Despite the healthy adoption rate by webmasters so far, implementing the rich snippets markup correctly can still be a major challenge. To help address this, we’ve added new error messages to the rich snippets testing tool to help you better identify and fix any problems with the markup.
If you’ve added markup in the past but haven’t seen rich snippets appear for your site, we encourage you to take a few minutes to try testing the markup again on the updated testing tool.
Rich snippets markup for breadcrumbs
Last year, Google announced a modification to search results to begin showing site hierarchies (typically referred to as "breadcrumbs") rather than standard URLs in cases where it helped users to better understand a website:
We are now adding support for a Breadcrumbs markup format that allows webmasters to explicitly identify the breadcrumb hierarchy on their pages.
If the breadcrumbs UI is already showing for your site, we'll continue to show it even if you don't do the markup, so don't worry about any existing UI disappearing. Note that this new format is experimental. Based on feedback and on other available standards, this format may be modified or replaced in the future. As with other rich snippet types, while markup helps us to better understand the content on your site, it does not guarantee that the breadcrumbs UI will be shown for your web pages in search results.
Events
In January, we added support for rich snippets for events. If a web page containing events listings showed up in search results, up to three links to specific events could be shown in the search result snippet.
This works well for general queries like [concerts in seattle], but we also wanted to improve the search experience when searching for a specific event. We will now show rich snippets when pages containing a single event show up in search results. Single event rich snippets now contain the date and location of the event:
For instructions on adding events markup, refer to the events page in the rich snippets documentation.
20 comments:
This data on new ways to affect how our search listing conveys data to users is fantastic, especially the breadbrumbs. It's a good encouragement that I'm doing the right things when google starts using some additional data like sitelinks or breadcrumb data on our search listing.
Had a suggestion - similar topic - with breadcrumbs or sitelinks could it be possible to somehow change the capitalization of the words that google picks up, in case the bots protray a different capitalization of words than the webmaster prefers?
One of my sitelinks is all caps, and others are not capitalized in a way that would make the most sense on search result pages (like Ip camera - best way would be IP Camera)
Thanks again!
For my blog satya-weblog.com , It was coming but removed from serp a long back. I do not know what went wrong
Thank you for this, it's very helpful.
Are the breadcrumb rich snippits relevant to all websites or just review sites and social networking/people profile sites?
Thanks
I did a bit of tweaking to my website and saw good results with snippets. They are good and get more clicks.
I cannot get data for any of the websites in the link you provided.
sweet i love breadcrumbs!
I think having a markup to specify breadcrumb trails is great - however, the markup isn't particularly pleasant. Some initial thoughts:
- Requiring nesting of elements and having a "child" attribute *only* for pages with multiple breadcrumbs is inconsistent. Developers who add one breadcrumb trail and later add another will also have to re-do the first one! And what if they have two but then remove one? This is a bit of a mess unfortunately.
- Why require a 'child' element at all? Why not simply terminate the breadcrumb trail at the closing tag for the breadcrumbs container and require that tags be in order?
- Why can't the link element have an "itemprop" of both URL and title? The additional span tag is completely superfluous.
both additions are great
but rich snippets for me is less useful !
266% extra code/bytes just to basically repeat the url path?
Whatever happen to just doing:
http://www.example.com/
http://www.example.com/catalog/
http://www.example.com/catalog/chairs/
http://www.example.com/catalog/chairs/comfy/
http://www.example.com/catalog/chairs/comfy/monthy_python/
No need for catalog.php?class="chair"&subclass="whatever"
As I assume that this is what the breadcrumbs where designed to help with?
A site with a proper path structure already has a natural breadcrumb, no duplicate content, etc.
Microformats are not an excuse t badly design websites.
Oh and those who do use all these microformats, at least have the common curtesy to use http compression so that a lot of that extra bloat can get compressed and use less bandwidth.
Google breadcrumbs code is not semantically correct at all :(
@Jonathan - the breadcrumbs markup is relevant to any website with breadcrumbs, not just review and social networking/people profile sites.
@Ian - your points are well taken. The most efficient possible Breadcrumbs markup would be more concise than the version specified here. However, there is a tradeoff between consistency with microdata and RDFa standards vs efficiency for representing this specific use case.
The microdata specification does not allow the itemprop attribute to be used on a link element to refer to anchor text. Thus, to be microdata standards-compliant, we've shown the additional span in our documentation to specify title. It would be great to see the microdata spec updated to allow what you propose.
Furthermore, both microdata and RDFa expect that the order of properties specified should not matter in terms of the interpretation by the parser. Thus, the child property is included to explicitly specify the relationship between breadcrumbs. However, given that breadcrumbs links are almost always specified in order from parent to child, we diverted from the official standards to allow child to be omitted, which reduces complexity and bytes for most webmasters. For anyone who doesn't want the inconsistency or potential rework, they can use the child property in all cases.
I think breadcrumbs is a great navigational tool which helps user to see where they are and adding rich snippets to it is really great news for the web developers.
I am looking forward to see more rich snippets introduced, I think it will make search experience better and will benefit website owners as well.
I just implemented Breadcrumbs format for my site. But as I noticed that breadcrumbs format is not validate by w3c validation, it shows some errors while validating my pages.
I use below given doctype
!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"
please help me out how I can remove errors from breadcrumbs?
Thanks
Nice, breadcrumbs i love this.
@hemant
W3 validation is not a ranking factor.
I have implemented RFDa breadcrumbs in my site www.gtricks.com and its doing pretty good :)
thanks your post !
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
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