[uf-discuss] Signalling use of microformats?

[Patrick Tufts]

Tantek Çelik wrote:
>> My experience is that crawlers will parse all HTML, and that the effort
>> to recognize an HTML-embedded tag that says "hey, this is a microformat
>> page" probably won't make life much easier, as by that point the page is
>> getting parsed anyway (in other words, there's nothing further to
>> prioritize).
> 
> Interesting.

I realized my wording was ambiguous. What I meant to say (and who knows,
it might have even come across this way) is that, if you've already put
microformat info into the page (an hEvent, for example), adding
additional information that just says "hey, crawler, this page has
microformat data" is unlikely to help the crawler any further as: 1) the
crawler has already retrieved the page, and 2) passed it along to a parser.

The only way I know of to help crawlers is to either provide simple
lists of things (robots.txt being one example, table of contents pages
with <= 100 links each being another), or useful info on the href link
to a particular page, as these sources of info get to the crawler before
it retrieves a given page.

--Pat