Microformats & Microdata

[activitysuper]

Hi,

Does splitting data apart using microformats & Microdata, help Google better understand your content and in turn could be used to increase relevancy?

O and does anyone know if it's supported across major browsers.

[altecdesign]

Its basic purpose is to allow search spiders to better understand what is what on your site. For instance, if you are selling a product and implement your product markup correctly Google can tell (and somewhat understand) what is what from the price, to quality (customer reviews), to what it should tell people it does (description) and looks like (image).

Some of these are already integrated into the SERPs others are expected to be integrated at a later date. Cooking seems to be one that has been a test bed for markup for Google. Look at the differences between this page and this page.

It is not really intended for browsers, just for search spiders. People do not require markups to tell us what is what because we can make logical sense of what is on webpages.

If you are just starting to markup your site use this: http://schema.org/

[MikeGracia]

It really depends on the data I believe.

Check this entry:  http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=146897

Also, this post over on searchengineland - http://searchengineland.com/schema-org-google-bing-yahoo-unite-79554 (and Google, MicroHoo and Schema.org)

As you should be able to see from those 2 posts, the 'general' answer to your question is: "Yes, and probably increasingly so". However it will also depend on what data you are trying to tag with microdata, to some extent...