Major Changes to Google's Rich Snippet Testing Tool
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David
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November 13th, 2012
As always, Google is a webmaster's best friend.
Rich Snippets Google Search (Photo credit: louisvolant)
They offer a wide variety of services for people like us, and they offer even more to make sure you can use them effectively.
The big news: Google changed the Rich Snippet Testing Tool to the Structured Data Testing Tool.
We discussed Rich Snippets last week. They allow us to display additional text and imagery on Google search results. For example, chefs can add a star rating to their recipes, bands can allow people to listen to their music with the touch of a button, and even ordinary Joes like you and I can provide access to our most popular pages or links.
Well, the process to add this feature to our websites can be a little tricky (especially in the past). Fortunately, there have been many improvements in the system that we can use to our advantage.
Basically, Google not only offers these Rich Snippets, but also tests our pages and links to make sure everything is showing up as intended. The Structured Data Testing Tool now allows you to see a much more accurate version of your new and improved search results and offers these tools in more languages.
Here's exactly what Google had to say about the changes:
- We’ve improved how we display rich snippets in the testing tool to better match how they appear in search results.
- The brand new visual design makes it clearer what structured data we can extract from the page, and how that may be shown in our search results.
- The tool is now available in languages other than English to help webmasters from around the world build structured-data-enabled websites.
Although this tool is still a work in progress, it is rather powerful and can show lots of great information even to people who haven't added Rich Snippets markup language to their sites.
Another great aspect of the new and improved Structured Data Testing Tool (formerly Rich Snippet Testing Tool) is that it shows Authorship markup, too. So, if you've added the coding to your website to show your Google+ author profile on the search results page, this tool with show you whether or not those changes have taken effect.
I highly recommend you heading on over and plugging it your URL to the previous Rich Snippet Testing Tool. It will show you what Google sees in regard to these changes, which is both exciting and helpful!
Of course, none of these products or services are perfect. What you thought would appear as X appears as Y, or vice versa. But, have patience. It takes time for all of these changes to appear in the Google system, but it is worth it in the end. From 15 minutes to a few weeks, your Authorship or Rich Snippets data will show up eventually.
To learn more about Google Webmaster Tools and how to use them to your advantage, check out these articles:
Rich Snippets: What They Are and How to Use Them
How to Verify a Site with Google Webmaster Tools