About Rich Snippets and structured data - From Google

About Rich Snippets and structured data - From Google

Structured data makes the web a better place. It also helps Google better understand and present your page in search results.

For example, we can recognize the following kinds of information on pages containing reviews, and may make them available in search results:

The writer of the review
The date the review was written
The rating (for example, 4/5)
For items with multiple user reviews, the number of reviews and average rating.
Here's an example of how Rich Snippets can appear in search results:



Google's first use of this data will be in search results snippets for two kinds of objects: Reviews and People. Providing more detail in search results helps users to understand the value of your pages. When users get more information showing how your page is relevant to their search, they're more likely to click through to see the full page. (Including this information will not necessarily affect your search results. As always, Google will use its own algorithms and policies to determine what information to show and when to show information based on user needs.) This structured data can also be used by Custom Search engines on your site, and gives you much more control over the behavior of your Custom Search engine. (Note: We currently support this structured content in English only.)

At Google we believe in openness, so we are supporting two open standards for marking up structured data: microformats and RDFa. To ensure that Google understands your markup, we encourage you to follow the format of our examples. You don't need any prior knowledge of microformats or RDFa to use these standards, just a basic knowledge of XHTML.

How microformats and RDFa work
Imagine that you have a review of a restaurant on your page. In your HTML, you show the name of the restaurant, the address and phone number, the number of users who have provided reviews, and the average rating. People can read and understand this information, but to a computer it is nothing but strings of unstructured text. With microformats or RDFa, you can label each piece of text to make it clear that it represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating. This is done by providing additional HTML tags that computers understand. These don't affect the appearance of your pages, but Google and any other services that look at the HTML can use the tags to better understand your information, and display it in useful ways—for example, in search results.

You can use whichever standard you prefer—microformats or RDFa— and you don't need to understand one in order to use the other.

If you are marking up structured data on your web pages, you can let us know. While we won't be able to individually reply to everyone who fills out this form and we can't make guarantees about how we may use data from any particular site, we may get in touch to learn more about your data.