Microformats
There are many different types of microformat such as hCard, RDFa, eRDF. A simple hCard information is added through classes in span tags. For example:
hCard
<span class="tel"> <span class="type">phone</span>: <span class="value">01234 56789</span> </span>
Would create telephone information on a business website say.
Events can also be added:
hCalendar
<div class="vevent"> <a class="url" href="http://labs.justsearching.co.uk/">http://labs.justsearching.co.uk/</a> <span class="summary">Microformats Post</span> <abbr class="dtstart" title="2009-10-05">October 5</abbr>- <abbr class="dtend" title="2009-10-05">19</abbr>, at the <span class="location">Just Search Programing Room, UK</span> </div>
hReview – used in Google rich snippets
hAtom – used for marking up content in blogs. The standards are still being written.
hProduct – product information.
hResume – resume information.
hNews – tags for new information
Geo – for location data, could be used in conjunction with maps applications, geo location of images, etc.
<div class="geo">Belvide: <span class="latitude">52.686</span>; <span class="longitude">-2.193</span></div>
FOAF (Friend of a friend) – machine-readable pages describing people, the links between them and the things they create and do
xFolk – is a simple and open format for publishing collections of bookmarks. It better enables services for improving user experience and sharing data in web-based bookmarking software. xFolk may be embedded in HTML or XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML. It is one of several open microformat standards.
Microformats and SEO
How do microformats affect SEO? At the moment it is early days, Google rich snippets are taking advantage of them of the site and as more people incorporate them into their site, the usefulness of them will be discovered.
A more advanced form of microformat has the intention of binding content with semantic reasoning.
RDF (resource description framework) – decompose knowledge into small pieces, with rules about the semantics of those pieces. Using this method, express any fact but have a computer understand it. In this example written in N3 grammar.
<http://www.example.org/> :john:Person . :john :hasMother :susan . :john :hasFather :richard . :richard :hasBrother :luke .
RDFa
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xmlns:foaf="http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" > <head> <title>My home-page</title> <meta property="dc:creator" content="Sir Pumpkin" /> <link rel="foaf:topic" href="http://www.example.com/#us" /> </head> <body>...</body> </html>
The Future for Microformats?
Search is moving toward aggregation and representation of data in answer to queries, much like Wolfram Alpha. There is growing support for microformats. It is used in Yahoo’s Search Monkey and Yahoo Search BOSS (Build your Own Search Service).
At the same time as microformats become another way of sifting content, they will be abused by spammers to obtain information.
Another danger would be the misrepresentation of data as happened with meta tags. The addition of microformat data may also mean that you might not get the visitors to your site because the data has been abstracted and used to form a new webpage to answer a search engine query.
Webmasters might be reluctant to go ahead with microformats but if others achieve success then they may be forced into it in order to compete. One thing is certain that as microformat become more widely used, practicing SEOs should now add microformats their toolkit.
Sir Pumpkin Longshanks
Programmer, Research and Development
[...] Just a quick blog to follow on from Sir Pumpkin Longshanks’ post about Microformats. Google have now released a neat tool to preview what pages with microformats will look like in the [...]
By What will your Rich Snippet look like? | JustSearch Labs September 2nd, 2009