Microformats help Google understand your content

Two years ago, Google announced support for microformats.  This is simply special tags you add to webpages that help identify the purpose of the page (is it a review, for example) and where specific data cn be found in the page (reviews always include a numeric rating, for example)

The initial support was only for reviews and pages about people, but in late 2009, Google added tags for identifying video content.  More recently, they have added support for products, events, businesses and organizations and even recipes!  They have also added a testing tool so that you can see what how your marked up page may be seen by Google.

The image below is the result of plugging one of my book review pages into that tool.

Taking the mystery out of microformats

If you visit http://microformats.org/about to learn more about microformats, you might experience a moment of panic. That panic might get worse if you go looking for technical specifications and stumble across their Wiki examples. Admittedly, this stuff can get very geekish very quickly.

Really, it’s not that bad. Microformats are nothing more than  XHTML markup that identifies data.

For example, let’s look at a book review, First, you wrap the review in a “hReview” tag.  We’d start off looking like this:

<div class=”hReview”>

</div>

We add an “item” tag:

<div class=”hreview”>

<div class=”item”>

</div>
</div>

The next step is to add a “fn” that identifies what is being reviewed:

<div class=”hreview”>

<div class=”item”>

<span class=”fn”>The Thing I am reviewing</span>
</div>

</div>

Note that it doesn’t matter that I use a div or a span – it’s the class tags that identify this as microformat.

Next comes the review itself:

<div class=”hreview”>

<div class=”item”>

<span class=”fn”>The Thing I am reviewing</span>

<span class=”summary”>

This thing is one of the most incredible things I have every reviewed. It really is the ultimate thing!

</span>

</div>

</div>

I finish it up with a few more tags:

<div class=”hreview”>

<div class=”item”>

<span class=”fn”>The Thing I am reviewing</span>

<span class=”summary”>

This thing is one of the most incredible things I have every reviewed. It really is the ultimate thing!

</span>

<span class=”reviewer”>Tony Lawrence</span>

<span class=”dtreviewed”>2011/02/24</span>

Rating: <span class=”rating”>4.5</span></p>
</div>

</div>

And that’s it.  It’s not really hard, is it?

What have we accomplished? We’ve told Google (or anyone else) that this is a review and we’ve shown them exactly where to find important parts of that review: the name of whatever it is being reviewed, who the reviewer is, the date, how much we like it and have even marked off the review text itself.

If Google wanted to show a useful search result with reviews ordered by date or by rating, this would certainly make it easy for them, wouldn’t it?

If everybody tagged their data this way, Google would know which posts really are reviews and which are sales page or tech specs – when we want to read reviews, Google could show us only reviews.

Unfortunately, they don’t – not yet, anyway.  They say “Note that there is no guarantee that a Rich Snippet will be shown for this page on actual search results”, and I agree: I’ve not seen one yet.  If Google is actually using this data, I’ve not seen it.

Why? One reason may be slow adoption. I have not converted all my reviews to this format and honestly have forgotten it on some newer reviews. There is also competition: the W3C group wants to use RDF tages for a similar purpose.

However, I have hope for the future. If Google expanded this to more types like Opinion, How-To,  and so on, I think semantic tagging could really help improve search. In the meantime, pointless as it may seem, I’ll try to keep adding these.

Popularity: 1%