Are You Working The RDFa Framework Into Your SEO Campaigns?

[morestar]

Since I was introduced to the RDFa framework just over a month ago by the Mysterious Mr. Webnauts I've been nothing but exited about the framework and how it can enhance the search results for ourselves and our (us SEOs) clients' websites.

There are a lot of people who still have very little knowledge that the RDFa framework exists and believe SEO hasn't changed much but it has.

Now under certain conditions and with certain search strings on both Google and Yahoo we can find instances where the RDFa framework integrated within a website can enhance their listing in the search results.

This page on AListApart.com gives a little introduction into the RDFa framework and shows how the search results can be enhanced by it's usage/implementation.

Are you familliar with the RDFa framework? Are you an SEO who has been integrating RDFa into your website documents - for yourself or your clients?

As I mentioned before: although some people feel it's useless to get into the RDFa and SEO all I can respond with is that Google and Yahoo are now displaying data in the search results from websites that do have RDFa integrated into their code and if a client asks us to have their listings in the search results show this information/data then we as SEOs need to take the RDFa seriously as I'm sure the question will arise one day, one way or another in time.

[morestar]

Ya it's been hard to find as there are only a few sites out there right now offering RDFa primers...but by the end of 2010 I'm sure there's going to be a flood of information about it.

I'm still wondering how the RDFa framework hasn't gotten the attention that it seems it should have seeing that both Yahoo and Google are working it into their search results now.

[chandrika]

alistapart.com ...i seem to remember that site as being where the holy grail of css layouts was at...

Anyway, thats really interesting article, i like the repeated
"RDFa: Now everyone can have an API"
in the examples, that is quite a good point.

btw part 2 of this article is at
A List Apart: Articles: Introduction to RDFa II
and it goes on to say how to add properties to an image and metadata to any item.

I need to read some more as so far i am seeing in the examples alot of labels about authors and date created, but i want to know what other labels can be put on sections of content, i saw in the rich snippet example pic from google that they had the number of reviews of a product on a page, so i guess each review had an rdfa label @review or something and i am trying to understand how do they mark that up, can you create your own "@whatever" that can be assigned wherever necessary in your content, then later collated however for use elsewhere, or is their a list of already created labels that can be used only?

[morestar]

I believe there is a library for each @ - here are some examples of RDFa usage and here's the W3C RDFa Primer page...

With respect to the star ratings, that alone is enough for us to take this seriously as eventually our clients will be noticing these little changes and will be asking us how we can get their listings to display those elements.

Remember though, RDFa isn't only for search engines. It's a way to tell machines exactly what the data is about/related to so it can be used across many different platforms. ( I think I got that right - still studying)...

[chandrika]

Yes I was thinking that, about the possibilities of how it can be used to pull together info from a site or sites in ways that could make useful little applications... @also still studying but i also was thinking along those lines.

[morestar]

Yes basically other applications and so forth won't have to guess at the data they are gathering.

For instance with the star ratings on Google and Yahoo...both those engines have no doubt that the information behind those tags are specifically related to product ratings and so they have no worries about displaying that (important) data...

It clears everything up from a machine point of view.

[chandrika]

It would seem to involve external apps needing to trust a site owners labels to some extent, i would imagine a site has to be quite trusted before say google would be using their rich snippet data.

I can see benefits for myself turning my site content into an api to use myself, but would i trust another sites labelling....not sure..same problem with meta data where keywords and descripton were put and now SE say they take little notice as such meta data was so abused...

How are external apps going to know what to trust?

[Dinghus]

Good point about trust. I could flood my site with these little snippets saying one thing when the site is actually about something else. How would a spider or any other machine really know?

[morestar]

Yes very good point and this is something I definitely have to figure out.

I know one thing: most normal/legitimate sites wouldn't add false data and why would they when they would want (for instance) their search results to display these little data snippets?

However there must be something somehow that verifies the data.

I do know that there are validation services through W3C - the same page validation services we generally use to validate XML/CSS but...that doesn't verify the data.

Good question and this is a must to figure out...stay tuned...

[Dinghus]

And since when has the internet/seo been dominated by "normal/legitimate" sites? lol