Are Microformats worth the effort for SEO?
SEO
SEOmoz suggests webmasters invest in microformats for SEO because search engines are getting better at reading semantic markup.
One example the site offers is marking up events online with microformats.
But I’m not convinced microformats is the way to go.
- They are confusing
- They require extra markup
- They misuse the class attributge
- There are better alternatives
- They aren’t manageable
At Gunner Technology, we like to give our clients the option to manage what we build for them. It’s easy for use to integrate microdata into our CMS, but not somuch with microformats. To ask our clients to understand what it is and apply it to their content is too much of a challenge.
With HTML5, I see search engines turning focus to microdata and deprecating microformats.
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Your objections make little sense to me; lets take them one by one:
1. Microformats are designed to make sense to people already marking up with HTML; they are designed for ease of markup, not for ease of parsing and so are relatively straightforward to add.
2. The amount of extra markup is minimal; usually a few extra classes, rather than a block of embedded XML, meta attributes, or complex constructs.
3. The class attribute was designed for more than just styling; read this: http://microformats.org/2005/10/19/more-than-styling
4. Those alternatives are all more complex, more markup and less mature; microformats are very focused on particular vocabularies, not arbitrary extensions.
5. No enough information here to argue, but the billions of existing microformats in major sites indicate to me that they’re manageable by most.
Why is your CMS incapable of adding classes to templates, but can add item and itemprop? That seems very odd design
Thanks Kevin,
Let me try to address your points:
1) Very true. But, when I have clients who ‘know’ HTML and will input markup into their pages, they can easily break the format. Or not use it at all. Which also Touches on point 5. Clients will ask me to fix or add them and it becomes unscalable
2) personal preference, but I would definitely prefer extra attributes to extra tags
3) True but the extra usage was vague and interacting with values stored as classes with JavaScript is like making out with your hand. You can do it but it’s akward and feels weird.
4) I can make CMSs produce microformats, but, again, with clients, producing automatic attributes has been far more failsafe than extra markup
5) see 1
I really like microformats and added them to ESPN.com in some places a year ago, but they were a stopgap which dataformats replaces.