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Data types supported by Data Highlighter

Data Highlighter - Events

You can use Data Highlighter to tag data about events, such as a concert or an art festival. Then Google can present your data more attractively -- and in new ways -- in search results and in other products such as the Google Knowledge Graph.

For example, for pages that describe a single event, Google search results can display a rich snippet like this:

Rich snippet for a page with only one event.

For pages that contain information about multiple events, Google search results can display a rich snippet like this:

Rich snippet for a page with multiple events.

The Google Knowledge Graph can display your data like this: Data Highlighter data in the Google knowledge graph.

Usage guidelines

After Google crawls your page set, each Google product applies its own rules when deciding whether and how to display your data. For example, Google search results will display as rich snippets only for events that are in the future and that appear to be legitimate events.

Examples of event names that Google considers to be valid:

  • East Bay Symphony Concert
  • Music Festival Northwest

Invalid event names:

  • Trip package: San Diego/LA, 7 nights (Don't use Data Highlighter to promote non-event products or services.)
  • Music festival - only $10! (Instead, tag ticket prices using the Ticket property.)
  • Sale on dresses! (Non-event information)
  • Concert - buy your tickets now! (Promotion)
  • Concert - 50% off until Saturday! (Promotion)
If rich snippets aren't appearing after Google has crawled your site, see possible reasons why.

Event tags

You can use Data Highlighter to tag any of the data described in the table below. Each tag corresponds to a property in the schema.org/Event schema. (The data you can tag with Data Highlighter is a subset of the properties in the schema.org schema.) Where the Data Highlighter and schema.org names differ, the schema.org name appears in parentheses. Required tags are listed in bold below. The Tagger page displays required next to required tags.

If your site is missing any of the data described below, you can add missing data from Data Highlighter. If Data Highlighter has a low level of confidence in the tagged data, an alert icon (Alert Icon) displays while you are creating a page set. Data Highlighter will still make the low-confidence data available to Google, but other Google products might not use it.

Tag Description
Name The name of the event.
Date  The date, date and time, or date range of the event. For details on how to tag dates, see Tagging Dates.

Here are some examples of dates you can tag:

  • A single date. For example, you can tag any of the following:
    • June 4, 2012
    • 4 June 2012
    • 6/4/12 - Your tags can include other delimiters and four-digit years as well, such as 6-4-2012. When numerical dates are ambiguous, Google assumes that the first number is the month. For example, 6/4/12 is intrepreted as June 4, 2012, while 13/4/12 would be interpreted as April 13, 2012.
    You can tag multiple dates on a page. For example, if you tag June 4, 2012 and June 6, 2012, the event will be intepreted as occuring twice: once on June 4th and once on June 6th.
  • A range of days. For example, June 4-7 2012
    Note that delimiter between the beginning and ending days needs to be a dash (-).
  • Dates with times. For example, you can tag any of the following:
    • June 4, 2012 3pm - a time followed by am or pm. Google uses normal business hours to interpet times not followed by am or pm. For example, 11 would be interpreted as 11am and 2 would be interpreted as 2pm.
    • June 4, 2012 15:00 - military time
    • June 4, 2012 3pm EST or  June 4, 2012 3pm -5:00 - Times with a time zone or with a UTC/GMT offset.
    • June 4, 2012 2-3pm or  June 4-5, 2012 2-3pm - Time ranges with or without a date range.
  • Dates in separate pieces.You can use the advanced tagging option to tag the following separate pieces of text as a single date:
    • Day: Tuesday, June 4 Year: 2013
    • June 4 | Time: 7:30pm-9:30pm and 2012
    Google does not recognize date ranges that have been split into multiple tags. For example, the following tags are not valid date tags:
    • June 4-5 and 2012
Location (place) The location of the event, specified as two separate sub-properties:
Tag Description
Venue (name) The name of the venue.
Address (PostalAddress) The address of the location at which the event occurs.
Image An image describing the event. You can tag more than one image.
Official URL (url) The URL to a web site that describes the event. You can tag more than one URL.
If you tag an event name that also happens to be a hypertext link, Data Highlighter automatically uses the link's URL for the event. For example, if you tag an event name that looks something like this in raw HTML: <a href="http://example.com/eventName">My Event Name</a>, then Data Highlighter uses "http://example.com/eventName" as the event URL. Note that:
  • Data Highlighter automatically uses the URL only if the URL points to a page in your page set.
  • The URL will not display in the My Data Items column. You can confirm that the URL was added by viewing the structured data page.
  • If you explicitly tag a different URL for the event, Data Highlighter will use the URL that you tag.
Category The category of the event. You can tag more than one category.
Performer A performer in the event. You can tag more than one performer.
Ticket (offer) Information about the price of the event, specified as two separate sub-properties:
Tag Description
type (name) A description of the price information (such as "Adults" or "Children").
price The price of the event.
You can tag more than one price description.

 

updated 05/15/2013

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