About rich snippets and structured data
Google tries to present users with the most useful and informative search results. The more information a search result snippet can provide, the easier it is for users to decide whether that page is relevant to their search. With rich snippets, webmasters with sites containing structured content—such as review sites or business listings—can label their content to make it clear that each labeled piece of text represents a certain type of data: for example, a restaurant name, an address, or a rating.
Providing this information doesn't affect the appearance of your content on your own pages, but it does help Google better understand and present information from your page. (Learn more about rich snippets for Local Search.)
The image below displays a rating and price range—very useful to anyone searching for information about a restaurant.
This kind of markup is designed for sites containing specific types of structured data. Google currently supports the following information types: reviews, people profiles, products, business listings, recipes, and events.
You can mark up your structured HTML content any of three formats: microdata, microformats, or RDFa. You can use whichever standard you prefer. You don't need any prior knowledge of these formats, just a basic knowledge of HTML.
(Note: Marking up your data for rich snippets won't affect your page's ranking in search results, and Google does not guarantee that markup on any given page or site will be used in search results.)
Next steps
The properties supported by Google are based on a number of different formats. For more information, see the following articles:
For specific vocabulary and examples, see:
Google also recognizes markup for video content and uses it to improve our search results.
- Check your markup using the rich snippets testing tool.
- If rich snippets aren't appearing for your site, see possible reasons why.
Once you've marked up your site's content, Google will discover it the next time we crawl your site (although it may take some time for rich snippets to appear in search results or Place Pages). You can also let us know about your content. Google won't be able to individually reply to your message, but we may use the information you supply to improve our detection and display of information in search results.