Google released their data highlighting tool in 2012, and it still works today even though it hasn’t migrated to the new Search Console interface and almost no one I know uses it anymore. Google’s John Mueller told Mastodon that it couldn’t be easier to use the data marker these days with all the plugins you can add to your site to manage it automatically.
John Mueller he wrote in response to a question about whether it makes sense to use Google’s data highlighter, “No”, it no longer makes sense to use it. He added “it’s only if you can’t implement it” and said “with all the plugins, implementation is easier than ever”.
I asked John “is it still true that the data highlighting markup is still valid and used by Google Search today?” he said“Yes”.
Google’s Ryan Levering added some caveats to John’s answer saying that not everything the data marker does is consumed by Google Search for rich results. Ryan he wrote“The data highlighter schema types are not actively consumed in visual features and some have not been updated to support the fields that are required by the latest features. But the data will still flow as markup and I have seen it appear to some of our features still (it’s a small amount).”
So it seems that using markup will give you a better result. But Ryan said he expects the tool to be updated to support more than what is supported by markup. He wrote: “Maybe this will finally be the year I get better feature type parity. It’s harder to do with some features that need data that isn’t always easily found on the page. The console team search also owes me better reports (it’s filtered), but it’s hard to complain until I clean up the supported types.”
John also said a while back that you have more control with dialing, but the two methods are equivalent.
Do any of you use the data highlighter? I did a poll asking and most didn’t, and very few people took the poll, which leads me to believe that most people don’t even know what a data marker is:
Are any of you using Google’s data highlighter to get rich results instead of bookmarking? https://t.co/DdrgkcIzS2
— Barry Schwartz (@rustybrick) December 29, 2023
I wonder why Google kept it there – you can access it this way.
Discussion in the forum a mastodon.
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