DCMI and Google's rich snippets

[jimmyseo]

I haven't seen any consistent information regarding DCMI tags for organic SEO in a couple of years.

Webmaster Tools obviously has a rich set of instructions for microdata.  Has there been any updated testing on DCMI or information above the whisper/rumor stage on whether engines will be using Dublin?   As a final point, would it be worth going back to static pages that haven't been touched in a couple of years and updating them with microdata?  It seems a natural for retail sites and maybe some others, but what about content heavy pages?

[randfish]

Yeah - ditto here. I tested DCMI on a few sites years ago, and I know folks who've tested more recently. We also looked at meta data of any variety in our correlation/rank analysis in 2009 and saw the engines appear to ignore everything but the known tags - description, robots, etc.

[caseyhen]

Hi - I tested DCMI and hoped it would work many years ago, but it had no impact. I've talked to Googlers/Bing folks and heard them on stage say that they ignore all meta tags other than those specified - http://www.ninebyblue.com/blog/managing-robots-access-to-your-website-2/

In terms of microdata - there are rich snippets that Google now employs - http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170 but you'll need to get accepted/reviewed by their editorial staff to be included (and then send it in via your XML Sitemap).

Sorry to say that the engines haven't agreed on any new meta data since rel=canonical (and possibly AJAX crawling protocols), but neither Dublin Core nor anything else like it is in practice to the best of our knowledge.

If you run some tests and find something, please do let us know!