[uf-discuss] microformats for search engine spiders?

[David Mead]

Myself and a colleague were discussing microformats today and we
started wandering off on a tangent about the following.

Would microformats be the way forward to mark defined areas of a web
page for the sake of search engine spiders?  When anyone looks at a
web page the instinctively break it into navigation, content,
advertisements etc. What if we had standard names (microformats) to
wrap these areas in to work in conjunction with the sitemaps.org
standard in aiding the spiders to differentiate between the content
area and, say, text-ads area.  You could then delve deeper into the
XML file of your sitemap and tell it visit certain pages every day and
then specify which section of that page they should concentrate on.

I'd be interested in hearing if this a good use of microformats and
whether it's worth pursuing.

Regards,

Dave Mead