Google will soon announce the international availability of rich snippets, which is part of their efforts to make search engine results more useful to their users across the globe. In case you have been reading their blog posts, you must be already aware that rich snippets allow users to see additional facts and data from your site in search results. This can be explained by taking an example where they recently launched rich snippets for recipes. This, for certain sites, lets users see quick recipe facts as part of the snippet, making it much simpler and easier to determine if the page has what they are looking for.

Google has been receiving a lot of questions on their blogs and forums about international support for rich snippets. In fact, many of you must have already begun marking up your content, so for obvious reasons the announcement of international availability of rich snippets is very exciting for everyone.

Apart from adding support for rich snippets in any language, Google has also published documentation about how to mark up your sites for rich snippets in a number of languages, such as simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese, Dutch, Czech, English, German, French, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Korean, Russian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Turkish. Users can even change the Help language by scrolling to the bottom of the help page and choose the language they want from the drop-down menu.

It is highly advisable to read the documentation for taking advantage of the different types of rich snippets, which are currently being supported, for instance people profiles, videos, reviews, events, and recipes. If you want, you could also make use of their testing tool, which is in English only but very useful for testing markup in any language. By using their testing tool, you could start validating your markup for ensuring that results show as you would expect.

Last but not the least, you must have already heard many a times by now that Google is making a gradual approach to surface rich snippets. This implies that marking up your site doesn’t guarantee that Google would show rich snippets for your pages. Google is doing their bit for making sure that the users get a good experience. They are working really hard to expand coverage and include more web pages.