Since the early days of Sematic Web I have been expecting that this technology would become very important for Search Engine Optimization.

Until recently, however, the most important component for this to happen has been missing: the major search engines completely ignored RDF and other semantically enriched markup.

This as changed now finally Yahoo and, more recently, Google announced to analyze and index rich mark up like microformats and RDFa.

Just today I stumbled upon a nice article by the E-business and Web Science Research Group of the Universität der Bundeswehr München titled GoodRelations and Yahoo SearchMonkey with five very practical examples how to enhance your web pages for better relevance in the Yahoo search index.
They make use of RDFa and the GoodRelations Web Ontology.

This is all very exciting and I expect way more to come!

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I personally think that this marks the start of “real world” adoption of semweb, be it through a surrogate approach via microformats.
Why now? Because improved representation of your content in Google is simply too big to ignore. If embedding microformatted content (or, hopefully, RDFa) brings you an advantage in Google Page Rank, web site owners and SEO specialists will rapidly adopt the technology. Without the google index incentive this never would happen.

The other side may be that data quality gets diluted in a way. Up till now we are used to working with reasonably clean and consistent collections (like DBpedia, MusicBrainz to name a few), where the data quality matters all by itself. That is radically different from entering some code for the purpose of cranking up your rank on the search engines.

Maybe in a year from now we are all busy with implementing trust- and reputation systems for linked data instead of spreading the word. I’m curious if the nature of linked data makes this job any easier than with the unstructured web of documents.

Update: Ivan Hermann tells it all in a nutshell: RDFa, Google.

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• Google supports RDFa – SEOs work changes forever (ithoughts.de)
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• Google Announces Support for Microformats and RDFa (4cloudcomputing.blogspot.com)
• Will You Use Google’s New “Rich Snippets” Markups? (seroundtable.com)

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