I recently received a question from a reader asking about the way search engines were using microformats and other forms of structured markup.
Today, I am going to address that topic from the perspective of its impact on SEO. What is particularly interesting about this topic is that structured markup provides publishers a way to provide the search engines information about their website(s).
One of the original ways of doing that was with metatags. Unfortunately, these were so badly abused by spammers that Google stopped using it as a ranking signal. Google finally stated this publicly in this post in 2009, which notes that “Google has ignored the keywords meta tag for years and currently we see no need to change that policy.”
Google continues to indicate that markup is not used as a ranking signal: “Google doesn’t use markup for ranking purposes at this time.” However, there are important SEO benefits to using markup, and I will explore these in today’s column.
