Google Webmaster Tools: Introducing Data Highlighter for event data

Official Google Webmaster Central Blog: Introducing Data Highlighter for event data

Google is trying to help us present our data easier in Google searches by introducing the concept of “rich snippets”. This can be of particular importance to small businesses when presenting information on the website such as: Company name, personal name, phone number, address, date of event. The way in which this is done is to ‘encase’ these pieces of information in specific coding on the web page.

This is not at all straightforward even for webmasters who are used to coding, let alone small business owners who mange their own websites. Andrew Tobert has done a great piece that was discussed here. But even his witty, simple explanation is too much for many of us!

So, Google has provided an extra tool in Webmaster Tools (Optimisation>DataHighlighter) to help us carry out this identification of data without having to go into the html code of the site and change it. This video explains how to do that – although the facility is currently only set up to identify ‘events’ at the moment.

What do you think? Post your comments and own experiences below . . . . .

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