What is Google’s Data Highlighter?
Google officially released its Data Highlighter through Webmaster Tools in 2012. Essentially, it teaches Google about your site’s patterns of structured data – which in turn provides more opportunities for your data to be highlighted through different mediums and SERPs.
When the Data Highlighter was first released, it offered a way to highlight specific data referring to current events. Since the release of this tool, Google has been adding more and more features that allow you to define an ever-widening spectrum of non-text features on your website.
What kind of data does the Data Highlighter support?
The data highlighter now offers support for a wide spectrum of data types, including:
- Products
- Articles
- Events
- Local Businesses
- Restaurants
- Movies
- TV Episodes
- Books
- Software Applications
The data highlighter allows you to input information about any of these types of data on your site directly into Webmaster Tools – without having to change or update your code or anything else on your website.
The tool itself is also very simple to use, it is literally a click and point application – it allows you to choose what type of data you are looking to highlight, and where it appears on your site.
Why should you use the Data Highlighter for SEO?
As different varieties of SERPS multiply and divide across different device types and applications – the use of this tool becomes a simple and necessary way to submit your data so that it can be displayed in a multitude of ways through a variety of applications. The use of the data highlighter for product pages, for example, can allow your individual products and product pages to be aggregated and appear in competitive search results along with reviews of the product, pricing, and whether or not the product is currently in stock.
Any tools that we can utilize to efficiently deliver diversified data to Google’s engine can only assist in the searchability – and therefore the search rankings – of a site. It is in a search engine’s best interest to deliver the best search results to its users – therefore it is our best interest to hand-deliver those results to Google, using the tools they provide us to do so.
I had a good level of success with an eCommerce client who saw an increase in organic traffic after we highlighted their product pages properly. I’m all for clarity in signals to Google.
I was not aware from the Google data highlighter but after reading your information I come to the point that putting data on Google highlighter is much batter from SEO point of view as it highlight important events, products etc on search engines. This is best for both website owners to get traffic as well as for visitors to know about what’s happening in your website’s environment. Good to read about Google highlighter and it sounds like great tool 🙂
Yeah it is a great tool. And it will get more important over time for people who are not technical.
Hello Chrystal!
I actually like this Data Highlighter Tool for it is very easy to use. It is indeed a click and point application which allows us to choose what type of data we are looking to highlight and where it appears on our website. This tool allows us to input information about any types of data on our site directly into Webmaster Tools.
I like this data highlighter tool and found it best for the work I like to do in my daily routine. Google is offing great tools that are more helpful for the business personals to make their works easy and do all the things in a perfect way. It is a great idea from Google to make these tools for a complete virtual profile that we can access from all over the world.