The Google Webmaster Central blog announced improvements to their rich snippets feature. The improvements include a way to tell Google how you want your breadcrumb URLs to appear and an improved rich snippet testing tool.

The breadcrumbs you have seen before, we have pictures here. Sometimes you don’t like how Google shows breadcrumbs in the search results for your URL. This new rich snippet breadcrumb markup will help you communicate to Google how the breadcrumb should appear in the search results. Google doesn’t guarantee they will use what you send them, but it does increase the chances. For more on how it works technically, see the help documents.

Google released a way to preview rich snippets via a rich snippets testing tool. The tool was useful to see how Google would display your rich snippets in the search results, before Google actually showed them in the search results. But it wasn’t great in helping webmasters and developers with debugging coding issues with problems with the rich snippet markups. Now, Google has expanded the error reporting by added new error messages to the rich snippets testing tool.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search | Google: Webmaster Central

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz

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