On May 12th, Google began supporting rich snippets in the search results. That meant Webmasters could mark up their HTML with richer data using microformats and RDFa and Google could then, if they deemed it to be appropriate, display the richer snippets in their search results.

One of the issues on the webmaster front with this is that a webmaster had no idea how the Google snippets would look like, until Google actually displayed the richer snippet in the Google results. Webmasters wanted a way to (1) preview the snippet and (2) validate they coded the page correctly.

Brian Ussery spotted that Google released a beta version of the Rich Snippets Testing Tool that does just that. What is interesting is that you can plug in any URL, not just URLs that you own via the verification process in Google Webmaster Tools, and preview the snippet data. For example, my LinkedIn profile is available for preview without me owning LinkedIn, and I bet you can see it also.

Here is a screen shot:

I have some more details at the Search Engine Roundtable.

Related Topics: Channel: SEO | Google: SEO | Google: Web Search | Top News

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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