Google data highlighter: quick and easy structured data without any code

There are an enormous number of pages on the web, but none are more important than search engine results pages, or SERPs. If you get your Drupal website to the top of Google search, don’t get too comfortable. The primary goal is to keep the user’s attention and increase click-through rates and site traffic. In one of our articles we discussed the role Google Search Console plays for your website’s SEO. Today we are going to stop and introduce you one of its useful tools for structured data implementation, namely Data Highlighter.

Google Data Highlighter and its main functions

We all know that structured data markup is vitally important for SEO, as it helps Google to promote a better understanding of your Drupal website. By tagging the main data fields on the pages of your website, you can improve the look of your structured data and increase your rankings in SERPs. Google found a solution to this, and it developed a handy tool for everyday users with a high level of organization called Data Highlighter. It is one of the main tools of the Google Search Console and allows you to mark up structured data on your website without the need to use any code. It teaches Google about the type of information on the page and the tagging data (location, time, event name, price and other specifications). The tool supports a variety of structured data: Events, Software Applications, Restaurants, Movies, Books, Products, Articles and more.

It sounds quite simple, doesn’t it? However, Data Highlighter is not a perfect tool. It is the subject of lively discussion among many everyday users. The following list of benefits and drawbacks will help you make the decision to use it for structured data implementation on your website or not.

Benefits of using Structured Data

• Data Highlighter is a free Google tool. You can save money and begin to reap its benefits right now.
• This method gives you the possibility to markup your events, various products, articles and other structured data types in a flash.
• The tool is very suitable when you’re code-illiterate and/or don’t have extra money to involve developers to put a schema markup on your website.
• Data Highlighter is relatively user-friendly for implementing structured data and can be managed even by novice users. By using it, you can increase your website’s position on SERP.

Disadvantages of using Google's Data Highlighter tool

• It takes some time to get Google to fully understand the pattern of your structured data. You have to apply Data Highlighter on many web pages before the search engine presents your structured data more attractively.
• If you make any changes in any aspect of the web page’s coding, it will lead to the Data Highlighter breaking down. In this case, you will need to start from scratch and rebuild your snippets completely.
• And the last, but not least important, downfall — Data Highlighter is appropriate only for Google. Unfortunately, other search engines, like Yahoo, Yandex or Bing, will not have the possibility of using the structured data markup at all. Obviously, this can be a bad influence on your online business success.

Taking into account all the argument’s pros and cons, you can decide whether Data Highlighter is the right tool for implementing structured data and working on the SEO of your website. If possible, entrust all SEO issues to a reliable developer.  But as a temporary fix, or if you have a small budget, the Data Highlighter tool from Google is a win-win solution.

We hope the above information was meaningful, and contributed to your high-quality structured data implementation. To facilitate this task, you can always count on our web support team. Contact us and we’ll sort things out!