echwa.com

Back in May this year the Google Webmaster Central blog announced that Google had rolled out support for what they termed ‘rich snippets‘ and further define as samples of content. This support for showing additional data in their Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS) is based on using Microformats and RDFa structured data.

Today, a Googler has linked in the Microformats Discussion group a new tool within Google Webmaster Tools that allows webmasters to “check that their markup is being correctly parsed by Google for use
in Rich Snippets”. Try the tool out today by visiting it at http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

A couple points to note up front (from Kavi’s post at http://microformats.org/mailman/listinfo/microformats-discuss):
- Currently Rich Snippets supports hCard, hReview, hReview-aggregate, and hProduct. Other microformats may not be recognized by the tool.
- Google don’t currently support the include pattern.

This new tool does not appear to be available in the main Webmaster Tools navigation just yet.