Microformats for search a real possibility?

Microformats are a way of adding simple markup to human-readable data items such as events, contact details or locations, on web pages, so that the information in them can be extracted by software and indexed, searched for, saved, cross-referenced or combined. …Microformats.org

I’m a huge fan of microformats they provide a semantic structured approach to XHTML markup without the need for a new standard or anybody to learn something new. like folksonomies (tagging to you) its a very common sense approach to a complicated problem. We have discussed microformats in the past relating to search engines in the form of Geo Targeting when we discussed the adr and geo formats.

Recently several new ideas have been put forward based around providing information to search engines about where links go and suggestions for ways to prevent search engines listing parts of pages.

Linking with knowledge

When we link to a site or a site links to us we want to tell the search engines as much about the link as possible and unless we explicitly state otherwise share a level of trust and authority between the two parties in the link. The following microformats have been designed to provide extra information that may help search engines and other crawlers make more reliable choices when it comes to valuing a link. Note: Very few search engines currently use these attributes and several are still in draft form.

rel-directory (draft) - Indicates the link goes to a directory page or listing.

<a rel="directory" href="http://www.randomdirectory.com">Random site</a>

rel-enclosure (draft) - Indicates the link goes to an “embedded file” such as a media file or other binary blob that can’t be searched such as non optimised flash documents.

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/mymovie.mov" rel="enclosure">My Movie</a>

rel-payment (draft) - Indicates the link goes to a method of payment such as paypal or ecommerce check out.

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/checkout.php" rel="payment">Checkout now</a>

rel-tag - Indicates part of a folksonomy driven navigation page or link to folksonomy directory, such as the tagging system in wordpress or Technorati.

<a href="http://www.mysite.com/tag/tech" rel="tag">tech</a>

rel-nofollow - The granddaddy of them all, indicates that search engines should not apply any linking of authority between the 2 pages (it doesn’t prevent crawling rather it prevents any passing of ranking weight between the two pages)

<a href="http://www.mymatessite.com" rel="no-follow">dodgey site</a>

Controlling the page

Wouldn’t it be great if we could tell the search engines which part of the page we want crawled, preventing them crawling advertising, privacy disclaimers etc.

Robots-exclusion - is a draft microformat which hasn’t been adopted by any major search engine but uses class=”robots-nofollow” to define whether the contents of a div should be indexed or not. like any css class you can have multiples defined to an element class=”navgation robots-nofollow” for example.

This very simple technique would give serious control to web developers but none of the big engines have adopted it and so our story ends their loads of great methods with nearly all redundant or not implemented…

…Wait
Robots-nocontent - developed by Yahoo and currently only supported by Yahoo the robots-no content was based around the robots-nofollow. Like the robots-nofollow it is based on the class attribute which can be applied to divs, spans, and p tags to provide a wide range of ways to deploy it.

Couple of things robot-nocontent is a Yahoo only thing, and while it is a microformat it is not published or endorsed by microformat.org. It is also experimental but expect big G to follow suit but will they go with Yahoo or microformat.org

Lets hope that the others get on board and we see all the major search engines supporting at least one standard.

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