Troubleshooting Data Highlighter
If you have problems creating or publishing a page set, look through the troubleshooting information on this page.
Creating a page set
After I enter my starting URL and click OK, I get an error.
This could be caused by any number of reasons, including:
- If you get a "URL not found" error, the verified page or URL might not be indexed by Google. For example, any of the following could prevent Google from indexing a site:
- A robots.txt file, crawl errors, or meta tags on your page prohibit Google from indexing it. Learn more.
- Information on your site is unreachable by Googlebot because it's only accessible by filling out a form.
- A Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) claim has been made against some of the materials in the page set you are trying to create.
- The URL for the page you specified isn't in the same site as the one verified in Webmaster Tools. For example, if you clicked the
http://www.example.comsite on the Webmaster Tools home page, then Data Highlighter requires the URL to start with
http://www.example.com. To highlight a URL that starts differently, such as
https://www.example.com, you need to add that site separately.
When I try to create a custom page set, an error message displays.
Any of the following error messages could display in the page picker popup when trying to create a page set:
|This message...||Displays if...|
|Pattern does not include start page.||
The URL pattern you specified doesn't include the starting page that you used to create the page set.
For example, if you specified the following URL as the starting page:
To highlight URLs containing the
|Pattern includes too many pages.||
The URL pattern you specified includes more than 500,000 pages. Consider creating multiple page sets with fewer than 500,000 pages each.
For example, if your site contained information about events under
Instead of specifying a URL pattern of
|Pattern includes pages that you do not manage.||
The URL pattern you specified includes pages that are not part of the verified site on Webmaster Tools.
For example, if
Specify a narrower URL pattern, such as
|Pattern does not match any pages.||
Data Highlighter didn't find any pages that match the pattern you specified. Check for typos and make sure you've entered the correct URL.
If you still see this message after checking for typos, try to expand the scope of the URL pattern. For example, change
When creating a custom page set, make sure that you:
- Specify a valid URL pattern. Note that Data Highlighter does not support regular expressions. Instead, you can use * as a wildcard for an entire URL component only. For example, this URL pattern is valid:
But the following pattern is not valid because it's trying to use * as a wildcard for part of a URL component:
- Specify a URL that identifies at least one page that has been crawled and indexed by Google.
Data Highlighter doesn't understand my site.
If you've already gone through a few rounds of tagging and Data Highlighter still doesn't understand your site, try starting over and creating a page set with just one page. If that succeeds, create a single-page page set for each important page on your site. If this doesn't succeed, you'll need to use HTML markup instead of Data Highlighter.
Publishing a page set
Extracted data displays on the Structured Data page, but still no rich snippets are shown in search results.