To reference profiles of rel=“tag” and rel=“nofollow”, yes or no?

StackOverflow https://stackoverflow.com/questions/11220239

  •  17-06-2021
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Question

Microformats.org recommends users to reference a profile of every microformat they used. For example, content that uses hCard should reference its profile by using one of the following three lines of codes:

<head profile="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard">

<link rel="profile" href="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard">

This content uses <a rel="profile" href="http://microformats.org/profile/hcard">hCard</a>.


I guess it's because that without referencing profiles, search engines like google will have no way to understand microformats and all microformats codes will then turn into pointless things.

In my personal opinion, sometimes modifying the head element or adding extra link or a elements is inconvenient. So for hCard, I probably will forget about it and use the microdata equivalent.

However, microformats like rel="tag" and rel="nofollow" have no microdata equivalents. If I use them and don't reference their profiles, will search engines understand their meanings?

Was it helpful?

Solution

Yes, they will. Search engines are liberal towards markup, in line with the robustness principle, because a lot of markup on the Web is broken. In your case it’s not even broken, it just fails to honor a convention outlined in HTML 4.01.

Note that Google, for example, has documentation on microformats that makes no mention of profile. It also has a testing tool that you can use to check your markup.

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