Back at the beginning of December 2012 Google introduced a new Webmaster Tool enabling anyone with access to your clients or your company’s Webmaster account to boost search results by educating Google about your websites event related data. Once event data has been tagged using the data highlighter, Google is able to better present event data through the use of rich snippets on the search results page. In essence the tool tells Google to flag data as structured which it is then able to index in search results.
How to use Google Data Highlighter tool
In what is a major departure from the usual method of using html to mark up data as structured the Google Data Highlighter tool uses mouse point and click functionality. A simple user friendly ‘walk through’ format guides you through the tagging process on your nominated web page allowing event related data to be assigned the data structure attributes adopted by Google. In addition to this new user-friendly methodology, should your site have multiple web pages of event related information in a standard format, then Google can be taught the format and any format variations allowing the automated suggestion of tags. Completing this exercise correctly at the first time of using the Google Data Highlighter allows Google to identify any new event listings which will then be displayed in the enhanced manner on the search engine results page when your website is crawled.
Advantages of Google Data Highlighter
Google Data Highlighter makes it easy for someone without experience or lacking confidence in html to make relevant changes to a website which will have a positive impact to the performance of that website on the search engine results page. This will be especially useful to small businesses and SME’s who maybe wanting to market their own events or do not have the in-house capability to make changes of this nature to their website html. For the web marketer it becomes another useful and quick instrument to use within Google Webmaster tools to aid Search Engine Optimisation.
Google Data Highlighter - the future?
The decision by Google to roll-out a feature which removes the burden of technical knowledge is to both aid the adoption of the feature, an experiment to see how Google Webmaster users react and possibly a look into the intentions of the web giant and where it sees the future of how we will interact with structured data. Time will tell if the data highlighter tool will be developed for use with data other than events.
