Has anyone implemented "RDFa" and/or "microformats"?

[William Davis]

Has anyone implemented "RDFa" and/or "microformats" anywhere (e.g.: Home, Category and/or Product pages) in their store?

If so, could you please share some advice on the matter?

[Siamese-Dream.Com]

Re: Has anyone implemented "RDFa" and/or "microformats"?

Hi there, Bill:

I have to ask, what are "RDFa" and/or "microformats"? I apologize that I have never heard of them.

Thanks in advance,

[William Davis]

Re: Has anyone implemented "RDFa" and/or "microformats"?

Hi there, Bill:

I have to ask, what are "RDFa" and/or "microformats"? I apologize that I have never heard of them.

Thanks in advance,

It's really not complicated at all. I am sure you have heard of "Web 2.0", "Semantic Web", etc... Well, "RDFa" and "Microformats" are emerging standards for implementing same. I have been following it for quite a while, but it is only recently that search engines, etc... are getting better organized on adopting several different standards. Essentially, its a method of wrapping a "<tag>" and/or embedding meta code in an existing tag between content to facilitate search engines, etc... to interpret and format your data. In other words, a method of providing more data about the data.

Example:
Many web pages attempt to provide addresses, albeit in an unstructured format. HTML does offer the "<address>" element:

<address>
Joe Smith
123 Murphy Avenue, Sunnyvale, California 94086
(408) 555-1234
</address>

but this element only indicates that the content is an address, and says nothing about its structure. A software program might be able to "guess" the structure using regular expressions or other techniques. However, the problem grows more and more challenging as you consider more types of contact information, international address formats, and other complications.


By contrast, an address "marked up" is much less ambiguous:

<div id="hcard-Joe-Smith" class="vcard">
 <span class="fn">Joe Smith</span>
 <div class="adr">
  <div class="street-address">123 Murphy Avenue</div>
  <span class="locality">Sunnyvale</span>, 
  <span class="region">California</span> 
  <span class="postal-code">94086</span>
 </div>
 <div class="tel">(408) 555-1234</div>
</div>

I guess a picture is worth a thousand words.



If you had a choice between displaying your content on search engines search results, with noise (before) or without noise "formatted" (after), which one would you choose?

Here is a recent article: More Major Google Changes; Search Options Surface

Enjoy!

[Geographicus]

Re: Has anyone implemented &quot;RDFa&quot; and/or &quot;microformats&quot;?

I am doing this now. It is easy to implement but as to its value - remains to be seen.

[William Davis]

Re: Has anyone implemented &quot;RDFa&quot; and/or &quot;microformats&quot;?

I am doing this now. It is easy to implement but as to its value - remains to be seen.

We have already incorporated microformats to our templates, but have decided not to roll out same into production for the time being.

Though there is no question "...as to its value" (providing additional structured data about existing data to facilitate the dissemination of segmentation requests, etc...), there is however an inherent risk that the same medium used to facilitate the advancement of one's own content, may be used by unintended parties for their own commercial use without attribution and/or compensation to its legal owners.

All major search engines have already announced support for some type of structured data format ("RDFa" or "microformats"), but none have published how, and where they are using the data. I suspect Bing is making extensive use of it in their decision shopping portal. Perform a search for the phrase "digital camera" without the quotation marks and you will see what I mean. Notice, how the result data is segmented to facilitate requestor's research/decision -this is definitely a good thing.

However, I cannot help being apprehensive in taking advantage of such medium until search engines establish a method to distinguish, attribute, and compensate content legal owners.

[Bruce - PhosphorMedia]

Re: Has anyone implemented &quot;RDFa&quot; and/or &quot;microformats&quot;?

yes, without clear standards, this would be a colossal waste of time for store owners...I already see many store owners spend far too much time chasing "SEO" potions, and far too little on getting "sales" (i.e., conversions) and building a businiess.