Google has launched two new tools for webmasters to provide the search engine with structured data from their sites.
For one, Google’s Data Highlighter now supports eight types of structured data, including: 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,” explains product manager Justin Boyan. “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.”
More on Data Highlighter here.
The other tool is the Structured Data Markup Helper.
“As with Data Highlighter, one simply points and clicks on a sample web page to indicate its key data fields,” says Boyan. “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.”
These tools should help webmasters stay current with the evolution of Google into products like Knowledge Graph and Google Now, while also potentially improving these Google offerings themselves.
“When Google understands a website’s content in a structured way, we can present that content more accurately and more attractively in search,” says Boyan “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.”
You might also be interested in this recent Google talk about integrating Google’s Knowledge Graph data into your own apps.