Google Data Highlighter

[adamxj2]

Hello Mozers!

Anyone out there have any experience using the Google data highlighter tool in WMT?  I'm just curious if it is something I should be utilizing or should just try to get the same results using microdata markup. I'm not a fan of "tools" per se...I'd rather get my hands dirty.

Just looking for any thoughts or experiences in using it.

[OlegKorneitchouk]

Have experience with both, found using actual schema tags into the HTML code is better for getting the snippets into search results.

[adamxj2]

Why is that?

[OlegKorneitchouk]

A client had their site marked up via the highlighter tool and the snippets didn't appear in search. I double checked and it looked like they did everything correct.

I manually edited the themes to hardcode the schema and they started appearing in SERPs within the week.

[adamxj2]

Interesting.

I tried it on one of my sites and I just didn't like how glitchy it was. I'll probably wind up doing it the old fashioned way on the rest of my sites.