Bing Adds Markup Validation Tool

Bing added a new Rich Snippet Markup Validation Tool on March 3rd. Bing's Duane Forrester reported on their Webmaster Center Blog the details of the new tool. The Validator is reported to support the following formats:

• HTML Microdata
• Microformats
• RDFa
• Schema.org
• Open Graph

Don't get too excited as this tool, which quite clearly is marked BETA, seems to have a few bugs. It seems to work great for Open Graph Tags, but when we tested it on some Microformat Event markup, it failed. That same markup when tested with Google's Rich Snippet Tester works fine, and Google is indeed using that markup in their search results for that page. So, if this tool reports back to you that something is wrong, don't get too wound up, it may be a problem with the tool and not your code.

Now we're not saying we're perfect on the code for the Microformat vEvent code example that was said to be in error by Bing, perhaps something is wrong in our code that Google tolerates, but not Bing. Regardless, it would be real nice if there was some kind of error explanation for this tool to help users identify where the errors are at, similar to other HTML validators.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this new tool is that you at least have a place now to test your markup from Bing's point of view. Assuming your markup works with this tool, we would have to assume Bing should be able to use it in the search results. We do highly advise also testing with Google's Rich Snippet tester as well.

If you would like to test a URL with extensive amounts of markup, try