This was originally written in response to a question from my team at Morpheus Media. Lately we’ve been discussing on our team the use of Microformats and RDFa. There’s recently been a significant rise in industry attention to these emerging formats – earlier this year Google released its Webmasters Rich Snippets Testing Tool.

Based on my research, I believe that RDFa Microformat tagging on eCommerce sites may help make the specific product-level data more accessible and indexable by search engines. Microformat adoption seems to be somewhat minimal right now, and it’s unclear how relevant they are for crawlers, but if there’s available development bandwidth to implement these potentially experimental formats on an eCommerce site, we could see a resulting boost in search relevancy.

Here’s some research on the topic, with notes.

• Customer Paradigm RDFa microtagging summary
  • Good basic walkthough of implementation options for RDFa Microformats
  • Includes good definition of main microformat tags

• MicroFormats.org hProduct Microformat Specification
  • Within the hProduct microformat, I believe the “description” and “category” datafields may be used to denote products that are “on sale”