Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools.
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. Update 19 February 2013: Data Highlighter for events structured markup is available in all languages in Webmaster Tools.
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!
This looks VERY useful. I am finding it quite problematic hand-coding this stuff.
ReplyDeleteHi, 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.
ReplyDeleteAwesome!
ReplyDeleteGood one.
ReplyDeleteThank you i am using this.
ReplyDeleteDoesn't seem to be available in Germany yet ;( :(
ReplyDeleteIT's incredibly awesome...and even more easy then HTML markup.
ReplyDeleteNot even in french :(
ReplyDeleteThank 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!
ReplyDeleteIn the sphere of events, this means that if your site has multiple, similarly structured pages containing event data, you can highlight event ... DB Mall
ReplyDeleteHi, Good feature. Getting error "URL must begin with http://www.domain.com. Does it not support https? or what could be the issue? Thanks
ReplyDeleteWas 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.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteI wonder how we can make the use of this on a site like this one.
ReplyDelete@Tony Accurso and @EMA Webmasters: Can you post in the forums details of when you're seeing that error message?
ReplyDeleteAlso, 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.
ReplyDeletegreat .. Google helping us a lot in it....
ReplyDeleteI found it so useful, good addition there. I am hoping more features will be added way too soon.
ReplyDeleteAbsolutely easy and very user friendly, already added and waiting to see the appearance
ReplyDeleteVery user friendly and innovative. One problem I'm having is selecting a date range from a drop down box. Is this not possible?
ReplyDeletevary useful tool for web masters.
ReplyDeleteThanks again Google, this is really useful and is a nice short cut to dispense of some code
ReplyDeleteWhat about https?
ReplyDeleteOur site www.bisanon.com uses https connection and we could not introduce the domain for Data Highligher.
Do you know if it will be supported soon?
Thanks
hi can you please check my site and let me know why I cannot get it to be verify...?? I have no idea what is the mistake can you help..Thanks Gil
ReplyDeletewww.paz-park.com
Thanks for the tool, but it doesn't work for any of the URLs I've tried. It gives me a 'URL invalid' message even though I'm copying the exact URL from my browser. Has anyone else had this problem with straight URLs (no subdomain, no https)?
ReplyDeleteI can't get highlighter to work with any of my URLs (e.g. http://www.ScienceMadeFun.net). I'm copying the exact URL from the browser window. Has anyone else had this problem?
ReplyDeleteData highlighter can't find my domains either (http://chesapeakehotyoga.com) I've seen others with this issue but no responses. Has there been a solution posted?
ReplyDelete@Steven Herron: Have you seen our Data Highlighter troubleshooting guide?
ReplyDeletehttp://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=2692952&topic=2692946&ctx=topic
If you need more help please post the full details in our forums:
http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!categories/webmasters/structured-data
Details to include: which site you're looking at in Webmaster Tools, which URL you're trying to highlight, what steps you took, and what error message you see.
Thanks!
Pierre
I understand this is for events only? When are you going to release other types?
ReplyDeletehttp://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2012/12/introducing-data-highlighter-for-event.html
ReplyDeleteHi, is there a way to format other types of information too? I think about computer language reference/documentation. I run a site with a special javascript documentation (www.tim-schenk.de/max-javascript-reference). It looks like it was removed from search index. Maybe its because the allgorythm thinks its a keyword spam site, i don't know. So is there a way to format computer language words like public, void etc.? Is there a way to mark the overview table as referenc for the real entry below on the same page?
ReplyDeleteThanks Tim
What type of data is meant for data highlighter / structured data? I'm still getting familiar with this tool.
ReplyDeleteI've had the chance to test this out on a site we manage, and it works very well with the sort of regularized format of an "events" plugin in WordPress. And even without one, it's surprisingly good at predicting data structure across multiple pages. Can we expect this to be implemented across the whole spectrum of schema.org categories sometime soon?
ReplyDeleteSome time ago I was tagged data highlighter, but now the error is coming on Tag page .
ReplyDeleteerror: Page cannot be displayed. Please contact your service provider for more ditails. (11)
Error Page Snapshot link:
https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-m-AKFHJzFms/UTdSOAhN1pI/AAAAAAAABzU/6PhgEPim_8s/s901/Data+Highlighter+Error.JPG
Please Help! How to fix it.
This is an interesting development at GWMT's. For over a year GroupAngle (htttp://groupangle.com-soon to be http://shopwaze.com) users have been extracting structured product data using the GA widget and saving the information to their collections on our social network. The GA widget selects data in a similar way and then passed the information to back end servers for further data processing. Users have extracted products from 60,000+ sites. We also extract the data from the entire website automatically once a user has extracted at least one product from a site. Our widget works on basic product data unlike Google Highlighter. We are working on rich attribute extraction also. We going to build apps on top of the data to make shopping search more efficient for users. We are thinking about how to best build an API for the data to expose it.
ReplyDeleteHello,
ReplyDeleteI am agree with you guys but i am also worry why webmaster tool do not working with my live tv channels website that is www.glaxytv.com if you have any solution then let me know please.