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Showing posts with label structured data. Show all posts
Showing posts with label structured data. Show all posts

Tuesday, August 1, 2017

Badges on Image Search help users find what they really want

When you want to bake cupcakes, but you don't know what kind, Image Search can help you make a decision. Finding an image with a recipe can be challenging: you might end up on a page that has only pictures of these delicious things, or a cupcake fan site that doesn't have recipes, but everything else about them.
To help users find exactly what they want, Image Search on mobile devices now includes relevant badges on the thumbnails. Currently we have badges for recipes, videos, products, and animated images (GIFs).

If you have images on your site, you can help users identify the type of content associated with the image by using appropriate structured data on your pages. This helps users find relevant content quickly, and sends better targeted traffic to your site.
If you're publishing recipes, add Recipe markup on your page, for products, add Product markup, and for videos, add Video markup. Our algorithms will automatically badge GIFs, without the need of any markup. While we can't guarantee that badges will always be shown, adding the recommended structured data fields in addition to the required fields may increase the chance of adding a badge to your image search results.
You can use the Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that your pages are free of errors, and therefore eligible for the new Image Search badges. In addition, the Rich Cards report in Search Console can provide aggregate stats on your markup.
If you have questions about the feature, please ask us in the Webmaster Help Forum.
Posted by Assaf Broitman, Image Search team

Tuesday, June 20, 2017

Connect to job seekers with Google Search

July 20, 2017 update: Starting today, impressions and clicks stats for job listing pages and job details pages are available in the Search Analytics report in Search Console. Read more about how Jobs impressions and clicks are counted in the help centre. If you have questions, head to the webmaster forums.

At Google I/O this year, we announced Google for Jobs, a new company-wide initiative focused on helping both job seekers and employers, through collaboration with the job matching industry. One major part of this effort is launching an improved experience for job seekers on Google Search. We’re happy to announce this new experience is now open for all developers and site owners.
For queries with clear intent like [head of catering jobs in nyc] or [entry level jobs in DC], we’ll show a job listings preview, and each job can expand to display comprehensive details about the listing:
For employers or site owners with job content, this feature brings many benefits:
  • Prominent place in Search results: your postings are eligible to be displayed in the in the new job search feature on Google, featuring your logo, reviews, ratings, and job details.
  • More, motivated applicants: job seekers can filter by various criteria like location or job title, meaning you’re more likely to get applicants who are looking exactly for that job.
  • Increased chances of discovery and conversion: job seekers will have a new avenue to interact with your postings and click through to your site.

Get your job listings on Google

Implementation involves two steps:
  1. Mark up your job listings with Job Posting structured data.
  2. Submit a sitemap (or an RSS or Atom feed) with a <lastmod> date for each listing.

If you have more than 100,000 job postings or more than 10,000 changes per day, you can express interest to use the High Change Rate feature.
If you already publish your job openings on another site like LinkedIn, Monster, DirectEmployers, CareerBuilder, Glassdoor, and Facebook, they are eligible to appear in the feature as well.
Job search is an enriched search experience. We’ve created a dedicated guide to help you understand how Google ranking works for enriched search and practices for improving your presence

Keep track of how you’re doing and fix issues

There’s a suite of tools to help you with the implementation:

In the coming weeks, we’ll add new job listings filters in the Search Analytics report in Search Console, so you can track clicks and impressions for your listings.
As always, if you have questions, ask in the forums or find us on Twitter!

Posted by Nick Zakrasek, Product Manager

Monday, April 10, 2017

Similar items: Rich products feature on Google Image Search

Image Search recently launched “Similar items” on mobile web and the Android Search app. The “Similar items” feature is designed to help users find products they love in photos that inspire them on Google Image Search. Using machine vision technology, the Similar items feature identifies products in lifestyle images and displays matching products to the user. Similar items supports handbags, sunglasses, and shoes and will cover other apparel and home & garden categories in the next few months.

The Similar items feature enables users to browse and shop inspirational fashion photography and find product info about items they’re interested in. Try it out by opening results from queries like [designer handbags].

Finding price and availability information was one of the top Image Search feature requests from our users. The Similar items carousel gets millions of impressions and clicks daily from all over the world.

To make your products eligible for Similar items, make sure to add and maintain schema.org product metadata on your pages. The schema.org/Product markup helps Google find product offerings on the web and give users an at-a-glance summary of product info.

To ensure that your products are eligible to appear in Similar items:

  • Ensure that the product offerings on your pages have schema.org product markup, including an image reference. Products with name, image, price & currency, and availability meta-data on their host page are eligible for Similar items
  • Test your pages with Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool to verify that the product markup is formatted correctly
  • See your images on image search by issuing the query “site:yourdomain.com.” For results with valid product markup, you may see product information appear once you tap on the images from your site. It can take up to a week for Googlebot to recrawl your website.

Right now, Similar items is available on mobile browsers and the Android Google Search App globally, and we plan to expand to more platforms in 2017.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter, or on Google+. To prevent your images from showing in Similar items, webmasters can opt-out of Google Image Search.

We’re excited to help users find your products on the web by showcasing buyable items. Thanks for partnering with us to make the web more shoppable!

Posted by Julia E, Product Manager on Image Search

Monday, November 21, 2016

Rich Cards expands to more verticals

At Google I/O in May, we launched Rich Cards for Movies and Recipes, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Today, we’re expanding to two new verticals for US-based sites: Local restaurants and Online courses.

Evolution of search results for queries like [best New Orleans restaurants] and [leadership courses]: with rich cards, results are presented in new UIs, like carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right, or a vertical three-pack that displays more individual courses

By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through restaurant recommendations from sites like TripAdvisor, Thrillist, Time Out, Eater, and 10Best. In addition to food, users can browse through courses from sites like Coursera, LinkedIn Learning, EdX, Harvard, Udacity, FutureLearn, Edureka, Open University, Udemy, Canvas Network, and NPTEL.

If you have a site that contains local restaurant information or offers online courses, check out our developer docs to start building Rich Cards in the Local restaurant and Online courses verticals.

While AMP HTML is not required for Local restaurant pages and Online Courses rich cards, AMP provides Google Search users with a consistently fast experience, so we recommend that you create AMP pages to further engage users. Users consuming AMP’d content will be able to swipe near instantly from restaurant to restaurant or from recipe to recipe within your site.

Users who tap on your Rich Card will be taken near instantly to your AMP page, and be able to swipe between pages within your site.

Check out our developer site for implementation details.

To make it easier for you to create Rich Cards, we made some changes in our tools:

  • The Structured Data Testing Tool displays markup errors and a preview card for Local restaurant content as it might appear on Search.
  • The Rich Cards report in Search Console shows which cards across verticals contain errors, and which ones could be enhanced with more markup.
  • The AMP Test helps validate AMP pages as well as mark up on the page.

What’s next?

We are actively experimenting with new verticals globally to provide more opportunities for you to display richer previews of your content.

If you have questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.


Post by Stacie Chan, Global Product Partnerships

Wednesday, September 7, 2016

Showcase your site’s reviews in Search

Today, we’re introducing Reviews from the web to local Knowledge Panels, to accompany our recently launched best-of lists and critic reviews features. Whether your site publishes editorial critic reviews, best-of places lists, or aggregates user ratings, this content can be featured in local Knowledge Panels when users are looking for places to go.

Reviews from the web
Available globally on mobile and desktop, Reviews from the web brings aggregated user ratings of up to three review sites to Knowledge Panels for local places across many verticals including shops, restaurants, parks and more.

By implementing review snippet markup and meeting our criteria, your site’s user-generated composite ratings will be eligible for inclusion. Add the Local Business markup to help Google match reviews to the right review subject and help grow your site’s coverage. For more information on the guidelines for the Reviews from the web, critic review and top places lists features, check out our developer site.
Critic reviews
In the U.S. on mobile and desktop, qualifying publishers can participate in the critic review feature in local Knowledge Panels. Critic reviews possess an editorial tone of voice and have an opinionated position on the local business, coming from an editor or on-the-ground expert. For more information on how to participate, see the details in our critic reviews page.
The local information across Google Search helps millions of people, every day, discover and share great places. If you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Ronnie Falcon, Product Manager

Friday, August 12, 2016

Promote your local businesses reviews with schema.org markup

Since the launch of critic reviews last year, we have been focused on supporting more types of reviews, like restaurant reviews, cafes, or any other type of a local business. Recently we’ve announced the availability of critic reviews for local businesses. By incorporating structured data to their sites, publishers can promote their content on local Knowledge Graph cards and users can enjoy a range of reviews and opinions.

Critic reviews are available across mobile, tablet and desktop, allowing publishers to increase the visibility of their reviews and expose their reviews to new audiences, whenever a local Knowledge Graph card is surfaced. English reviews for businesses in the US are already supported and we’ll very soon support many other languages and countries.

Publishers with critic reviews for local entities can get up and running by selecting snippets of reviews from their sites and annotating them and the associated business with schema.org markup. This process, detailed in our critic reviews markup instructions, allows publishers to communicate to Google which snippet they prefer, what URL is associated with the review and other metadata about the local business that allows us to ensure that we’re showing the right review for the right entity.

Google can understand a variety of markup formats, including the JSON-LD data format, which makes it easier than ever to incorporate structured data about reviews into webpages! Publishers can get started here. And as always, if you have any questions, please visit our webmaster forums.

Posted by Jaeho Kang, Software Engineer

Tuesday, May 17, 2016

Introducing Rich Cards

Update March 28, 2017: Expanding Rich Cards globally

In 2016, we launched rich cards in the US, creating a new way for site owners to present previews of their content on the Search results page. Starting today, sites all over the world can now build rich cards across Google Search.

By building Rich Cards, you have a new opportunity to attract more engaged users to your page. Users can swipe through recipes in the UK from sites like BBC Good Food or browse movies in Mexico from Cinepapaya or view restaurants in Germany from Prinz.de. Also, rich cards support the AMP format. So if you build AMP pages, users will be able to swipe near instantly from page to page.

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Rich cards are a new Search result format building on the success of rich snippets. Just like rich snippets, rich cards use schema.org structured markup to display content in an even more engaging and visual format, with a focus on providing a better mobile user experience.
Evolution of search results for queries like [peanut butter cookies recipe]: with rich cards, results are presented in carousels that are easy to browse by scrolling left and right. Carousels can contain cards all from the same site or from multiple sites.
For site owners, this is a new opportunity to stand out in Search results and attract more targeted users to your page. For example, if you have a recipe site, you can build a richer preview of your content with a prominent image for each dish. This visual format helps users find what they want right away, so you're getting users who specifically want that especially delicious cookie recipe you have.
We’re starting to show rich cards for two content categories: recipes and movies. They will appear initially on mobile search results in English for google.com. We’re actively experimenting with more opportunities to provide more publishers with a rich preview of their content.
We’ve built a comprehensive set of tools and completely updated our developer documentation to take site owners and developers from initial exploration through implementation to performance monitoring.

Explore rich card types and identify where your content fits
Browse the new gallery with screenshots and code samples of each markup type.
Test and tweak your markup
We strongly recommend using JSON-LD in your implementation.
  • Find out which fields are essential to mark up in order for a rich card to appear. We’ve also listed additional fields that can enhance your rich cards.
  • See a preview in the revamped Structured Data Testing Tool of how the rich card might appear in Search (currently available for recipes and movies).
  • Use the the Structured Data Testing Tool to see errors as you tweak your markup in real time.

Keep track of coverage and debug errors
Check how many of your rich cards are indexed in the new Search Console Rich Cards report.
  • Keep an eye out for errors (also listed in the Rich Cards report). Each error example links directly to the Structured Data Testing tool so you can test it.
  • Submit a sitemap to help us discover all your marked-up content.
Find opportunities for growth
In the Rich Cards report, you'll see which cards can be enhanced by marking up additional fields.

Monitor performance
A new “Rich results” filter in Search Analytics (currently in a closed beta) will help you track how your rich cards and rich snippets are doing in search: you’ll be able to drill down and see clicks and impressions for both.


Q: Can I keep my existing rich snippets markup?
A: Yes, you can! We’ll keep you posted as the rich result ecosystem evolves.

Q: What about the Structured Data report in Search Console?
A: The Structured Data report will continue to show only top-level entities for the existing rich snippets (Product, Recipe, Review, Event, SoftwareApplication, Video, News article) and for any new categories (e.g., Movies). We plan to migrate all errors from the Structured Data report into the Rich Card report.

Q: What if I use the wrong markup?
A: Technical and quality guidelines apply for rich cards as they do for rich snippets. We will enforce them as before.
Learn more about rich cards in the Search and the mobile content ecosystem session at Google I/O (watch the recording on YouTube) or in our developer documentation. If you have more questions, find us in the dedicated Structured data section of our forum, on Twitter or on Google+.

Posted by Na'ama Zohary, Search Console Team, and Elliott Ng, Product Management Director, Search Ecosystem

Friday, September 5, 2014

An improved search box within the search results

Webmaster level: All
Today you’ll see a new and improved sitelinks search box. When shown, it will make it easier for users to reach specific content on your site, directly through your own site-search pages.

What’s this search box and when does it appear for my site?

When users search for a company by name—for example, [Megadodo Publications] or [Dunder Mifflin]—they may actually be looking for something specific on that website. In the past, when our algorithms recognized this, they'd display a larger set of sitelinks and an additional search box below that search result, which let users do site: searches over the site straight from the results, for example [site:example.com hitchhiker guides].
This search box is now more prominent (above the sitelinks), supports Autocomplete, and—if you use the right markup—will send the user directly to your website's own search pages.

How can I mark up my site?

You need to have a working site-specific search engine for your site. If you already have one, you can let us know by marking up your homepage as a schema.org/WebSite entity with the potentialAction property of the schema.org/SearchAction markup. You can use JSON-LD, microdata, or RDFa to do this; check out the full implementation details on our developer site.
If you implement the markup on your site, users will have the ability to jump directly from the sitelinks search box to your site’s search results page. If we don’t find any markup, we’ll show them a Google search results page for the corresponding site: query, as we’ve done until now.
As always, if you have questions, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help forum.

Update (16:30h CET, September 12th): We're noticing an enthusiastic uptick in the markup implementation after the initial announcement last week! Here are the two main issues we've observed so far, and what you need to do to fix them:

  1. Make sure that when you replace the curly braces and all that's inside of it with a search term it leads to a valid URL on your site.
    For example: if your "target" value is "http://www.example.com/search?q={searchTerm}", ensure that "http://www.example.com/search?q=foo" and "http://www.example.com/search?q=bar" both lead to search result pages about "foo" and "bar".
  2. Make sure that the "query-input" field points to the same string that's inside the curly braces in the "target" field.
    For example: if your "target" value is "http://www.example.com/search?q={searchTerm}", you must use "searchTerm" as the "name" within "query-input".
Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst, and Kaylin Spitz, Software Engineer

Wednesday, March 12, 2014

Musical artists: your official tour dates in the Knowledge Graph

Webmaster level: all

tour dates online

When music lovers search for their favorite band on Google, we often show them a Knowledge Graph panel with lots of information about the band, including the band’s upcoming concert schedule. It’s important to fans and artists alike that this schedule be accurate and complete. That’s why we’re trying a new approach to concert listings. In our new approach, all concert information for an artist comes directly from that artist’s official website when they add structured data markup.

If you’re the webmaster for a musical artist’s official website, you have several choices for how to participate:

  1. You can implement schema.org markup on your site. That’s easier than ever, since we’re supporting the new JSON-LD format (alongside RDFa and microdata) for this feature.
  2. Even easier, you can install an events widget that has structured data markup built in, such as Bandsintown, BandPage, ReverbNation, Songkick, or GigPress.
  3. You can label the site’s events with your mouse using Google’s point-and-click webmaster tool: Data Highlighter.

All these options are explained in detail in our Help Center. If you have any questions, feel free to ask in our Webmaster Help forums. So don’t you worry `bout a schema.org/Thing ... just mark up your site’s events and let the good schema.org/Times roll!


Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager, Google Search

Thursday, December 12, 2013

Structured Data dashboard: new markup error reports for easier debugging

Since we launched the Structured Data dashboard last year, it has quickly become one of the most popular features in Webmaster Tools. We’ve been working to expand it and make it even easier to debug issues so that you can see how Google understands the marked-up content on your site.

Starting today, you can see items with errors in the Structured Data dashboard. This new feature is a result of a collaboration with webmasters, whom we invited in June to>register as early testers of markup error reporting in Webmaster Tools. We’ve incorporated their feedback to improve the functionality of the Structured Data dashboard.

An “item” here represents one top-level structured data element (nested items are not counted) tagged in the HTML code. They are grouped by data type and ordered by number of errors:

We’ve added a separate scale for the errors on the right side of the graph in the dashboard, so you can compare items and errors over time. This can be useful to spot connections between changes you may have made on your site and markup errors that are appearing (or disappearing!).

Our data pipelines have also been updated for more comprehensive reporting, so you may initially see fewer data points in the chronological graph.

How to debug markup implementation errors

  1. To investigate an issue with a specific content type, click on it and we’ll show you the markup errors we’ve found for that type. You can see all of them at once, or filter by error type using the tabs at the top:

  2. Check to see if the markup meets the implementation guidelines for each content type. In our example case (events markup), some of the items are missing a startDate or name property. We also surface missing properties for nested content types (e.g. a review item inside a product item) — in this case, this is the lowprice property.
  3. Click on URLs in the table to see details about what markup we’ve detected when we crawled the page last and what’s missing. You’ll can also use the “Test live data” button to test your markup in the Structured Data Testing Tool. Often when checking a bunch of URLs, you’re likely to spot a common issue that you can solve with a single change (e.g. by adjusting a setting or template in your content management system).

  4. Fix the issues and test the new implementation in the Structured Data Testing Tool. After the pages are recrawled and reprocessed, the changes will be reflected in the Structured Data dashboard.

We hope this new feature helps you manage the structured data markup on your site better. We will continue to add more error types in the coming months. Meanwhile, we look forward to your comments and questions here or in the dedicated Structured Data section of the Webmaster Help forum.

Posted by Mariya Moeva, Webmaster Trends Analyst

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