[uf-discuss] Could microformats be classed as spam by search engines?

[brian suda]

justin norton wrote:

>  Hello,
>
> Could anyone provide an answer to the following:
> Google recently updated their search engine and now treat text that is
> hidden through CSS as spam.

--- do you have reference to this? but it is not relevant because you
shouldn't be hiding any microformat data with CSS anyway. The first rule
of microformats is 'Human readable' any hidden information goes against
this.

> How would this effect the implementation of microformats in relation
> to SEO?

--- microformats should not be hidden, so the effects are moot.

> Is the microformat standard open to abuse from spammers?

--- Microformats are built on top of HTML so, they gain all the benefits
and failures of it. Semantics is all about giving more meaning to data.
Some people have brought-up that adding class="email" to their mark-up
leaves them open to spam harvesters, but i would guess it is much easier
for a robot to be on the look out for '@' rather than microformats.

> And do the likes of Google, Yahoo and MSN currently recognise
> microformats as a standard for the presentation of data?

--- each does in various ways. Yahoo honors the rel="license" technorati
honors rel="tag" (and others) and other search engines crawl for XFN, etc.

-brian