[uf-discuss] microformats for search engine spiders?

[Andy Mabbett]

In message
<ca111b2b0701161356i3989f6afy171dcb2387ad80df at mail.gmail.com>, David
Mead <davidjohnmead at gmail.com> writes

>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.

I like the idea in principle, but I would imagine that few publishers
(particularly, no commercial organisations) would want to explicitly
label adverts, because that will make it easier for users and user
agents to ignore (i.e. not display) their contents, thereby reducing
their potential revenue (a comparison might be made with way TV
companies were forced to drop markers for adverts, by the advertisers)

-- 
Andy Mabbett

        <http://www.pigsonthewing.org.uk/uFsig/>

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