I’m super excited to be discussing Microformats with industry luminaries Joost De Valk and Bas van den Beld on Tuesday 15th June at 8pm in Europe, 7 in the UK, in the US at 2pm on the East Coast and 11am on the West Coast on the State of Search radio show on Webmasterradio.fm.
Microformats are an extension to xHTML to allow us to highlight (mark-up) items of data in a web page such as addresses, reviews, locations and even recipes! Think of them as a way of attaching extra meaning to the information published on a web page. Love them or hate them, Microformats are here to stay and the chances are you’re already using them. Rel=”nofollow” is an elemental Microformat, used (as we know) to show a search engine that you don’t editorially vouch for a source of information you’re citing as a link on a webpage.
There are many drafts or standard Microformats available to webmasters implement. You could use hRecipe to markup your recipes on a cooking website, hNews to add journalistic and original source data to an article or hProduct to highlight brand, price and product category information.
I’m really interested to hear your thoughts and questions on the topic of Microformats. If you have any questions, or you’d like to put forward some thoughts on topics for discussion, leave a comment below and we’ll address your issues in the show.
See you at 8pm in Europe, 7pm in the UK and in the USA, 2pm EST and 11am PST.
Editorial note: Joost did a presentation related to the topic last week (in Dutch). See the presentation below:
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I’m afraid I can’t tune in for the live show (but I’ll definitely download the podcast), but there are some questions I have about microformats:
1. Is implementing microformats currently an investment with a worthwhile ROI?
2. Microformats or RDF/a – which one will win in the end? Also, see q1: will we have to change everything later down the line?
3. For a news website, is it worthwhile implementing hNews? Does Google News use this microformat?
Really looking forward to this.
1. Is it worth using microformats on single pages of your site or should it only be used as part of a larger operation?
Example:
iPhone apps for SEO is a post we did which includes microformats and hReview in particular.
Is this giving us any benefit or is it a waste of time?
Thanks
Charlie
Barry, Charlie, thanks both for the questions – looking forward to the show.
Have been testing microformats for some time now and still haven’t seen any results. When does it come to Europe (Belgium)? And which one do we have to choose, there are so many ways. It’s really confusing. Can’t tune in tonight, hoping to get on answer on this in a reply. Have fun!
I use rich snippets for some reviews on the site; but Google doesn’t show snippets at the results. Why is that, and what can i do so it will be showed?
Regards,
Thomas
Hi Guys
Just a note to say thanks for the excellent questions – a really enjoyable session. Looking forward to doing more of the same with Bas and the team soon.
Richard
The shownotes + podcast will be online this morning. Also we are planning on doing webinars on this and other topics so stay tuned!
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