SEO News

Last year, we launched a new way for musical artists to list their upcoming events on Google: schema.org markup on their official websites. Now we’re expanding this program in four ways:

1. Official Ticket Links

For artists: if you mark up ticketing links along with the events on your official website, we’ll show an expanded answer card for your events in Google search, including the on-sale date, availability, and a direct link to your preferred ticketing site.

As before, you may write the event markup directly into your site’s HTML, or simply install an event widget that builds in the markup for you automatically—like Bandsintown, BandPage, GigPress, ReverbNation or Songkick.

2. Delegated Event Listings

What if you can’t add markup or an event widget to your official website—for example, if your website doesn’t list your events at all? Now you can use delegation markup to tell us to source your events from a page of your choice on another website. Just add the following markup to your home page, making sure to customize the three red values:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{"@context" : "http://schema.org", 
 "@type" : "MusicGroup", 
 "name" : "Your Band or Performer Name", 
 "url" : "http://your-official-website.com", 
 "event" : "http://other-event-site.com/your-event-listing-page/"
}
</script>

The marked-up events found on the other event site’s page will then be eligible for Google events features. Examples of sites you can point to in the “event” field include bandpage.com, bandsintown.com, songkick.com, and ticketmaster.com.

3. Comedian Events

Hey funny people! We want your performances to show up on Google, too. Just add ComedyEvent markup to your official website. Or, if another site like laughstub.com has your complete event listings, use delegation markup on your home page to point us their way.

4. Venue Events

Last but definitely not least: we’re starting to show venue event listings in Google Search. Concert venues, theaters, libraries, fairgrounds, and so on: make your upcoming events eligible for display across Google by adding Event markup to your official website.

As with artist events, you have a choice of writing the event markup directly into your site’s HTML, or using a widget or plugin that builds in the markup for you. Also, if all your events are ticketed by a primary ticketer whose website provides markup, you don’t have to do anything! Google will read the ticketer’s markup and apply it toward your venue’s event listings.

For example, venues ticketed by Ticketmaster, including its international sites and TicketWeb, will automatically be covered. The same goes for venues that list events with Ticketfly, AXS, LaughStub, Wantickets, Holdmyticket, ShowClix, Stranger Tickets, Ticket Alternative, Digitick, See Tickets, Tix, Fnac Spectacles, Ticketland.ru, iTickets, MIDWESTIX, Ticketleap, or Instantseats. All of these have already implemented ticketer events markup.

Please see our Developer Site for full documentation of these features, including a video tutorial on how to write and test event markup. Then add the markup, help new fans discover your events, and play to a packed house!

Posted by Justin Boyan, Product Manager, Google Search

Structured data markup helps your content get discovered in search results and across Google properties. We’re excited to share several updates to help you author and publish markup on your website:

• A new Structured Data Testing Tool to better reflect Google’s interpretation of your content
• Improved documentation and policy guidelines for Google features powered by structured data on the web
• Expanded support for the JSON-LD markup syntax

Structured Data Testing Tool

It provides the following features:

• Validation for all Google features powered by structured data
• Support for markup in the JSON-LD syntax, including in dynamic HTML pages
• Clean display of the structured data items on your page
• Syntax highlighting of markup problems right in your HTML source code

New documentation and simpler policy

We’ve clarified our documentation for the vocabulary supported in structured data based on webmasters’ feedback. The new documentation explains the markup you need to add to enable different search features for your content, along with code examples in the supported syntaxes. We’ll be retiring the old documentation soon.

We’ve also simplified and clarified our policies on using structured data. If you believe that another site is abusing Google’s rich snippets quality guidelines, please let us know using the rich snippets spam report form.

Expanded support for JSON-LD

We’ve extended our support for schema.org vocabulary in JSON-LD syntax to new use cases: company logos and contacts, social profile links, events in the Knowledge Graph, the sitelinks search box, and event rich snippets. We’re working on expanding support to additional markup-powered features in the future.

As always, we welcome your feedback and questions; please post in our Webmaster Help forums.

Posted by Pierre Far, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Tatsiana Sakhar, Search Quality Analyst, Zach Clifford, Software Engineer