Do micro formats affect SEO?

[thegrons]

Do micro-formats affect SEO? by adding rel="what the link is about" and how short should this description be? I have a 80 page site with at least 300 links on it, should I revise every link?

[Gaurav]

Microformats SEO and the Sumo parser.
1. Motivation.

Microformats give us the opportunity to add more machine-readable semantic value to HTML documents using structures with standardized class names.

So more precisely, what are microformats - Microformats? Microformats are a way of thinking about data, design principles for formats, highly correlated with semantic XHTML, a set of simple open data format standards that a diverse community of individuals and organizations are actively developing and implementing for more/better structured blogging and web microcontent publishing in general and much more. It is a way to write code and markup that a Bot should like and as such have the potential to improve your SE ranking.

2. An example: http://microformats.org/wiki/hcard

hCard is a simple, open, distributed format for representing people, companies, organizations, and places, using a 1:1 representation of vCard (RFC2426) properties and values in semantic HTML or XHTML. hCard is one of several open microformat standards suitable for embedding in HTML, XHTML, Atom, RSS, and arbitrary XML.


3. Microformats and SEO

How microformats affect search engine optimization ( SEO ) - USWeb Blog - Internet and Search Engine Marketing Blog

"So if you haven’t heard by now there is this new term called microformats spreading like crazy across the net. At first it can seem overly confusing but when digging into the heart of the matter the exact opposite is true. So what are microformats? Microformats are sets of simple data formats built for today’s technology (XHTML mostly) to solve simple problems. To speak in plain English a Microformat in most cases is a set of XHTML code embedded in web pages that provides a structured set of data that can be utilized for other means".

Googling for microformats - Joost de Valk's SEO Blog

"Imagine, you can type in a query like "joost de valk class:vcard" and Google comes up with my contact page, because that has a vcard class in it's markup, the main class of the hCard microformat. This was suggested today on the uf-discuss mailing list, a mailing list I've been lurking on for quite a while now, and it made me go "YES! That's what I want!"."

This is definitely a standard that has the potential to improve the SERP's.

4. SEO tools

SEO Goodies | Tag Cloud tool, SEO Keyword Discovery Tool, SEO Books

5. Dan Webb's Sumo Java Script parser.

Parsing microformats is difficult, but Dan Webb has written one parser:

danwebb.net - Sumo! A Generic Microformats Parser For JavaScript

For more information see:

The*Art*& Science*of JavaScript - SitePoint Books

chapter 5. That is a must read about meta programming in JavaScript and extending JavaScript to a better language with true object oriented features. If you understand that chapter (read, try the code, read again and reread until you understand it), you will be able to write cleaner, more flexible, more optimized and more reuseable Java Script code.

[Onil]

Google has stated that microformats don’t directly affect SEO, but they’ve also implied that removing ambiguity about the meaning of certain content could improve the propensity of search engines to find, index and rank content.