Preview Your Google Rich Snippets With Google Webmaster Tool

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:

Webmaster Tools - Rich Snippets Testing Tool

I have some more details at the Search Engine Roundtable.

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


About The Author: 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.


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Comments

2 Comments on Preview Your Google Rich Snippets With Google Webmaster Tool

Nick Stamoulis
nickstamoulis,

The Google rich snippets testing tool is excellent, I plan on reviewing your full review on your blog…thanks!



Stupidscript,

“Google’s first use of this data will be in search results snippets for two kinds of objects: Reviews and People.”

If your website is not a Review website or one about People, then you get nothing, for now: “Insufficient data to generate the preview.” For example, your Product website’s display will not change in the SERPs.



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