On the Google Developers site appeared markup for podcasts. With its help it is possible to obtain the Rich Snippet for podcast in the search results. It will include descriptions of the individual episodes and the built-in player.
At the moment, this type of structured data is only supported in the Google App (version 6.5 or higher) for Android devices and Google Home. In the near future support markup for podcasts will also be added to Chrome and Android.
To index the podcast, do the following:
- Create a RSS feed with the podcast's description. It must conform to the RSS 2.0 specification;
- Feed must contain at least one episode;
- The podcast should be placed on a home page. It must contain the element pointing to the RSS feed;
- Home page, RSS-feed and non-blocking all audio files must be accessible to Googlebot. This means that they should not be closed from indexing in the file robots.txt or by meta tag. In addition, they should not require to enter a username and password.
More information about the markup for podcasts available on the website of Google Developers.
In September, Google launched the Rich Snippets for pages training courses.
