Microformats are easy to learn, and pay off well in SEO and mobile

http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/200124/Now-is-the-Time-for-Your-Website-to-Adopt-Microformats

by hn12 • 14 years ago

23 4 14 years ago

blog.smartbear.com

mildweed• 14 years ago

I would like to see the W3C adopt more microformats into HTML5.

crazygringo• 14 years ago

Wait, where's the payoff? They haven't taken off because, for the vast majority of websites, it's not there.

If I mark up the address on my contact page... who cares? I've already got a map next to it anyways, and the business can already be found on Google Maps. And it's not like it's going to improve my PageRank or inbound links or anything. I see zero evidence that a marked-up address will bump me up five spots in Google for keyword searches.

And correct me if I'm wrong, but any mobile browser that will let you click on marked-up phone numbers to call them... will auto-detect phone numbers as well, no? Figuring out what's a phone number is not a hard problem, and false positives aren't really a big deal.

I'm not saying microformats are a bad idea in theory. It's just that they haven't taken off because there is no clear payoff for most people, neither programmer nor consumer. This article certainly hasn't convinced me of any. Maybe someone here can explain if there's anything I'm missing?

hn12• 14 years ago

Yes and no. You're absolutely right to ask these questions, and they're ones the article would have addressed more specifically with just a bit more depth.

Folklore has it that Google/Bing/... do give at least small bumps for correct use of microformats. SEO is such a mess--so non-deterministic, among other things--that we perhaps should leave this for another time. There is evidence for SEO, but it's generally smaller than "five spots ..."

Detection of telephone numbers ... well, I find it a challenge, especially when working across national borders. I totally accept that it might be a non-problem for you: the applications on iPhones or other leading handsets do everything you need for your US-oriented Web site.

I appreciate you giving the article a fair reading. Microformats are indeed rather foggy to figure out; do they truly matter? It sounds as though, for you, they might not, at the moment. If you're doing much internationalization, though, or working with calendars, or would benefit from automation of contact exchange, or ..., then it's worthwhile to experiment at least a little.

rada• 14 years ago

In the SEO realm, the majors (google/yahoo/bing) prefer microdata:

http://schema.org/

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...

(However, given lack of browser support, microformats are still key for mobile).

Microformats are easy to learn, and pay off well in SEO and mobile

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