

Microformats are easy to learn, and pay off well in SEO and mobile - hn12
http://blog.smartbear.com/software-quality/bid/200124/Now-is-the-Time-for-Your-Website-to-Adopt-Microformats

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crazygringo
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
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.

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

<http://schema.org/>

[http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&...](http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170)

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

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

