The Google Data Highlighter Tool became a lot more useful this week after the company added support for six new data types. This expansion gives webmasters a ton of new opportunities to beef up their rich snippets.
When it launched back in December, the Google Data Highlighter Tool was limited to events. Webmasters can now highlight:
As it stands, the Google Data Highlighter is only available for English language sites. Additional tags (beyond this set) and multilingual support should roll out later this year.
What is Google Data Highlighter?
The Data Highlighter is one of Google’s lesser-known tools, but it’s clearly one that the company expects to see webmasters embrace in the months ahead.
At its simplest, the Highlighter allows webmasters to highlight structured data event in a point-and-click fashion. This is a lot easier than manually manipulating code to point out these events to search bots.
When highlighted correctly, these data events become something that Google actually recognizes automatically. Company officials say that tagging data five to ten times is enough for the algorithm to catch on what’s going on.
Why Use Google Data Highlighter?
The idea behind Google Data Highlighter is that it gives Google more information upon which to build enhanced results, like Knowledge Graph.
What’s important to remember is that while using Highlighter gives Google additional information, there’s no guarantee they’ll actually wind up using it. That said, it always seems best to follow along with Google best practices.
Have you used Google’s Data Highlighter Tool? Share your experiences in the comments section below.