23 August 2023
At first glance as a novice web developer, microformats seem a little outdated. The resources related to them are from over 10 years ago as well as the occasional reddit thread querying their relevance.
According to microformat.org, an unsecured wiki page dedicated to microformats, they are
a small patterns of HTML to represent commonly published things like people, events, blog posts, reviews and tags in web pages.
microformat.org (accessed August 2023)
As a baby web dev, from the outside looking in, it appears to be a way of representing data in HTML for contact cards, or a digital business card to hand out to crawlers while keeping the data readable for humans. This digital business card may not always be contact information, but can also include the equivalent to:
- party invitations (events)
- diary entries or newspaper cutouts (blog posts)
- the Yellow/White pages* (geolocations)
- recipe cards (recipes)
- LinkedIn (resumes)
- letters to the editor (reviews)
Not knowing a huge amount about web crawlers at this stage, but painfully aware of the dizzying heights which AI and technology is aiming for, I hypothesise that the technology we have in place scraping the internet for all the data it can find, is probably doing a really good job without the need for microformats.
However, I’m not an expert on SEO. So doing what any good baby web dev does, we look to google for the answers.
ProRankTracker raises some good points on the advantages and disadvantages of microformats for SEO. Benefits listed include the increased semantics, simplicity for search engines and increased SEO. Downsides include:
- Harder to read
- Less stable than other formats
- Slow load time due to increased code
- Reduce responsive design
- Risk of data mining
- Smaller browsers don’t support them
Resources online have a general consensus that microformats improve SEO (untitledfirm.com, digitalvani.com, realtyna.com, hyperwrite.com), but none of the online resources can tell us just how much they improve ranking. Whilst microformats help bots work out that not everything is a date (unlike excel/incels), there appears to be no clear data on how much it helps SEO and if the trade off for site speed impact is worth it.
*for anybody under a certain age, in the White Pages you used to be able to look up mostly anybody by their last name to find out their home number and suburb in a large book which was given to every household and business. The Yellow Pages were the business equivalent to Googling businesses.
Sources:
ProRankTracker ‘What Are Microformats SEO? Here’s All You Need to Known’ David A. 19 October 2022, Accessed 23 August 2023
Microformat.org ‘What Are Microformats?’ Accessed 23 August 2023
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