Microformats – Google back the RDFa format

By Simon, 5 August, 2009, No Comment

One of the big issues of Web 2.0 is the computers inability to distinguish what the content is. You might well have “Author: Simon Day” which, to a human, is very obvious but to a search engine spider or computer it isn’t because the page can contain many names. It simply cannot extrapolate the information as well as a human because the pages can contain many other names, dates, times, URL’s, email addresses and so on . What we’ve needed for a long time is a way for the spiders and computers to know what is actually happening on a section of a page and give it precise details like, as an example, the when, the what and the who.

Microformats are a way of adding a small piece of markup so it can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined.

RDFa is becoming a widely adopted way of defining certain blocks of content (like the author, the date it was written, the real header and sub header for that block. With Google putting its weight behind it this could really start to take off in a big way.

W3C sums it up nicely:

“We introduce RDFa, which provides a set of XHTML attributes to augment visual data with machine-readable hints. We show how to express simple and more complex datasets using RDFa, and in particular how to turn the existing human-visible text and links into machine-readable data without repeating content.”

When I first saw this I could instantly see the benefits in many types of sites. The benefits for SEO must also clearly been seen.

If you have any kind of site in which you have multiple parts to once piece of content (Like date, author etc) then the benefits of using micro formats is immense!