Semantic HTML makes it easier for Google to crawl and 'understand' a website but what about microformats? Are microformats any more semantic/crawlable then standard HTML markup?
Google announced a little bit of RDFa and Microformats support in the last few days.
Links and commentary here:
http://rdfa.info/2009/05/12/google-announces-support-for-rdfa/
Yahoo has been using RDFa and Microformats to drive Search Monkey for some time:
http://developer.yahoo.com/searchmonkey/
Both will probably aid click-through rates, but not necessarily ranking. Expect more search engines to use more different RDFa vocabularies as time goes on. BOSS is also relevant here:
http://developer.yahoo.com/search/boss/
The intent is to help create more search engines and they will have access to the data in the pages.
For geographical information, Google will parse KML files and index them and the links in them.
I believe that Yahoo has gotten behind RDFa I don't think that Google has admitted to this yet.
AFAIK, all major search engines support the rel-nofollow microformat. Beyond that, I'm not aware of any support. However, there are smaller, more specialized search engines that have been specifically designed with microformats in mind. E.g. there are search engines that allow you to do searches on relationships between persons, using the XFN microformat.
As far as i know Google doesn't actively talk about these micro formats as a way of generating your page rank, from what i understand its more for other kinds of bots that are not just making a general purpose search engine.
At the moment Google did not announce any support for microformats yet. I hope, that in the near future they will.
On the other hand Yahoo has announced that it will support RDFa, eRDF and microformats.
They make your pages more semantic insofaras they force a bit more consistency in the way that you fit your information together. The major search engines can and do read microformats, and often use them to display what Google calls "rich snippets" ( http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/05/introducing-rich-snippets.html ), which adds some interesting stuff to SERPs. Bing and Yahoo both display these too.
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I defied all conventional knowledge, and wrote my HTML5 site first. Now I am writing the HTML4 site and adding a script which detects old browsers. The question I have is mainly regarding web safe fonts. I am aware that it is best practice to use HTML instead of images of pretty text, for the benefit of SEO. However, since the HTML5 website exists with the HTML in the headers, I wonder if it is safe to use images to represent those headers in the HTML4 version of the site. Simply put, will my web client's indexing suffer? I feel that the HTML5 version will ensure good ranking, but I wanted to put it to the community and get an opinion.
Second question, should I create the more accessible version in HTML4 or XHTML?
Finally, is there a simpler way to make a new site backwards compatible, and still be able to make use of newer technology?
After a fair amount of research, I found that it is not so unusual to create a site in HTML5, and implement items for the purpose of graceful degradation.
At this site: spacebug.com/gracefully-detect-old-browsers-and-fallback-from-html5/, the authors recommend not using PHP user agent variables to detect browser capability. It says that there are too many user agents and that headers change, etc. Check out the link for their in-depth explanation. It offers that the right way to do it is to use javascript to check for certain capabilities. Since my purpose is to either render it in HTML5 or render it in XHTML, this makes my life pretty simple.
Once I found that javascript was the way to go, a simple Google search led me to this site: diveintohtml5.info/detect.html. This offers a number of methods for detecting browser functionality as it relates to HTML5.
For those who are not as savvy with the code, or for those who are looking for a quick solution, the second website also offers a link to modernizr.com, which is an "open-source MIT licensed javascript library that detects support for many HTML5 and CSS3 features."
So, thank you all for your input. I have learned a great deal from this experience, and I am hoping it will make everything much more user friendly and efficient.
Happy developing!
Kat
I have just read a lot of different information about Data-Vocabulary.org and Schema.org about how it's good for SEO. But I'm really not sure that anyone uses it in a real site. Am I right?
If not can someone provide some links to real site with this stuff?
And second question does it make sense to use it in HTML5?
Search on Google for any restaurant, or destination covered by TripAdvisor or Yelp (in other words, any restaurant or destination) and you'll see the magic of microformats at work -- see the rating stars and other meta-information?
And yes: use them. And yes, follow schema.org guidelines. And no, it doesn't matter at all which version of HTML you use them in, so write in HTML 5 and do other good things.
Whether they help for SEO is a somewhat different question. Microformats are unlikely to have a significant influence on your site's rankings as long as you use them as suggested.
However, take a look at the pages that have them and are able to influence what a search engine displays when it lists your site. While some have argued that "there's no need to click through if all the information is summarized" this has not proven to be true in practice. (See this article http://searchengineland.com/how-to-use-rich-snippets-structured-markup-for-high-powered-seo-99081). In short, having microformats that distinguish your site from others is good for everyone.
So I've been looking into this HTML 5 Microdata, but I'm not sure if or when it is appropriate to use. I know that if used with rating and you search a website it will pull up things like video rating and article ratings etc. But for Microdata like People or Places, is that so useful that I should start implementing it into all my websites - big and small? How big of an impact will this really have on my SEO if I start using Microdata on everything?
Maybe using something like http://schema.org/ as my standard term dictionary. I think that is what Google suggests using. Here's a link to the dev of microdata http://dev.w3.org/html5/md/ which will be helpful if you are unfamiliar with microdata
Following to that Schema.org - Why You're Behind if You're Not Using It... article on SEOMoz, I must say this question is not just about microdata and Google SERPs positions. I think it has to be taken in a much wider meaning:
Some advantages:
Implementing microdata on a website DOES increase CHANCE for Rich
Snippets displayed next to your site on Google search results. You can't say 'microdata = rich snippets', but you also can't say 'no microdata = no rich snippets' :)
Having rich snippets increases users' attention to that single search result and it CAN result in more clicks => visitors on your page.
Some cons:
Some rich snippets, which can be a result of using microdata, can let users find information they're looking for directly on the search results, without actually reaching your page. eg. if user is looking for a phone number and see it on rich snippet, he doesn't have to click and visit your page.
You have to decide on your own if you can take that risk. From my own experience (and that article comments as well), that risk is quite small and if you can, you should implement microdata. Of course, 'if you can' should really mean: 'if you can and it won't need the whole site to be rebuilt' :) If you have more serious things to do on your site, you should put them in front of a queue. Today, it's only 'nice-to-have', not 'must-have'.
And just for the end - I know my answer is not just yes or not the answer, but it's because the question is not that kind of question. However, I hope it could help you make your own decision.
My answer would be "Always."
It's the emerging standard for categorizing all forms of information on the web.
Raven Tools (no affiliation) has a schema.org microdata generator that's a good place to start:
http://schema-creator.org/product.php
They have a couple stock schema templates on that page (look on the left column).
What is the benefit of using XFN (XHTML Friends Network)? I've seen this on multiple blogs and social networking sites but I don't really understand why it's useful. Other than being able to style these elements with CSS3 and select them with JavaScript, what's the benefit? Do you know of any sites out there that really utilize XFN to enhance the user experience? Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Do you know of any sites out there
that really utilize XFN to enhance the
user experience?
Microformats aren't meaned to show extra information on the website itself, if it was, it could be used like John. You should think in another direction, for example, maybe browsers will support microformats one day.
Search engines may find this XFN-information interesting for one or another reason to see how the world is connected; I'm not sure what they actually could do with this information. You can read about that on Wikipedia
By the way, you can find out who your friends on the web are using Google's Social Graph API
Also, are there similar alternatives to XFN?
Take a look at microformat.org's wiki
The Semantic Web is an awesome idea. And there are a lot of really cool things that have been done using the semantic web concept. But after all this time I am beginning to wonder if it is all just a pipe dream in the end. If we will ever truly succeed in making a fully semantic web, and if we are not going to be able to utilize semantic web to provide our users a deeper experience on the web is it worth spending the time and extra effort to ensure FULLY semantic web pages are created by myself or my team?
I know that semantic pages usually just turn out better (more from attention to detail than anything I would think), so I am not questioning attempting semantic page design, what I am currently mulling over, is dropping the review and revision process of making a partially semantic page, fully semantic in hopes of some return in the future.
On a practical level, some aspects of the semantic web are taking off:
1) Semantic markup helps search engines identify key content and improves keyword results.
2) Online identity is a growing concern, and semantic markup in links like rel='me' help to disambiguate these things. Autodiscovery of social connections is definitely upcoming. (Twitter uses XFN markup for all of your information and your friends, for example)
3) Google (and possibly others) are starting to pay attention to microformats like hCard and hCalendar to gather greater information about people and events going on. This feature is still on the "very new" list, but these microformats are useful examples of the semantic web.
It may take some time for it all to get there, but there are definite possible benefits. I wouldn't put a huge amount of effort into it these days, but its definitely worth keeping in mind when you're developing a site.
Yahoo and Google have both announced support for RDFa annotations in your HTML content. Check out Yahoo SearchMonkey and Google Rich Snippets. If you care about SEO and driving traffic to your site, these are good ways to get better search engine coverage today.
Additionally, the Common Tag vocabulary is an RDFa vocabulary for annotating and organizing your content using semantic tags. Yahoo and Google will make use of these annotations, and existing publishing platforms such as Drupal 7 are investigating adopting the Common Tag format.
I would say no.
The reason I would say this is that the current return for creating a fully semantic web page right now is practically zero. You will have to spend extra time and effort, and there is very little to show for it now.
Effort is not like investing, however, so doing it now has no practical advantage. If the semantic web does start to show potential, then you can always revisit it and tap into that potential later.
It should be friendly to search engines, but going further is not going to provide good ROI.
Furthermore, what are you selling? A lot of the purpose behind being semantic beyond being indexable is easier 3rd party integration and data mining (creating those ontologies). Are these desirable traits for your data sets? If you are selling advertisement, making it easier for others to pull in your content is probably not going to be helpful.
It's all about where you want to spend your time.
You shouldn't do anything without a requirement. Otherwise, how do you know if you've succeeded? Do you have a requirement for being semantic? How much? How do you measure success? How do you measure return on investment?
Don't do anything just because of fads, unless keeping up with fads is a requirement.
Let me ask you a question - would you live in a house or buy a car that wasn't built according to a spec?
"So is this 4x4 lumber, upheld with a steel T-Beam?"
"Nope...we managed to rig the foundation on on PVC Piping...pretty cool, huh."