Google has quietly added new rich results markup for podcasts in the developer center. Aaron Bradley seemed to have first spotted this and posted it on Google+ saying that "a new data type has appeared in the Google reference library of structured data types: podcasts."
Google said "you can enable your podcast to appear in Google Search results along with individual episode descriptions and an embedded player for each." This will however only work for searches done on the Google Search app version 6.5 or higher on an Android device or on Google Home. Google said they do want to add "support for Chrome on Android soon."
Here is how it might look:
I am going to try to add it for my weekly SEO video podcast here and see what happens.
So those of you who have Google Home can ask for it on demand. Maybe one day...
In order to index a podcast, you must do the following:
- Expose a valid RSS feed describing the podcast that conforms to the RSS 2.0 specifications as well as the feed requirements described below.
- The feed must contain at least one episode that conforms to the requirements given on this page.
- The podcast must have a dedicated homepage with the elements described below. The homepage must have a
<link>pointing to your RSS feed. - The homepage, the RSS feed, and any non-blocked audio files must be exposed to Googlebot; that is, they must not require a login, and must not be protected by robots.txt or
<noindex>tags. - If you want your podcast to appear in Google Play, you should also read the Google Play Music podcast RSS feed specifications. The RSS specifications for Google Play Music and Google Search are complimentary but not identical, so if you enable support for one, you neither prevent nor enable support for the other.
Forum discussion at Google+.
