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Beware of search engines bearing (copyrighted) seo boosting gifts

Something important is happening to markup.

The semantic web – that’s xhtml right? About 5 years back that was the only way, but today its modern take is RDFa

What should I beware of then?

Competing standards licensed under FRAND terms.

For those of you not familiar with Frand, it is a pretence. It’s proponents will use the word ‘open’, however there are always caveats, and a ‘boys club’ mentality involved.

You cannot confer Frand to anyone else and that is where the lie is outed.

Ask anyone bearing Frand gifts this question

If the terms are Non-Discriminatory, like you say, then how come I cannot give those rights to the other 50 people in my local business networking club?

 

So RDFa is an open standard?

Yes. In 2008 the standard reached ‘Recommend status’ and has the backing of the web standards body W3C.

The Wikipedia link above gives a short snippet, but here is a more in-depth primer on RDFa

http://www.w3.org/TR/2008/WD-xhtml-rdfa-primer-20080620/

So if I want to add ‘richness’ to your content and make it easier for search engines to index, use RDFa.

There are at least two alternatives to RDFa being promoted at the moment, however both of the other markup extensions would result in your website content being subject to ‘Terms and Conditions’ defined by their proponents.

The web was never about corporate ownership of tags and markers.

As a company you need to have a strategy for rich markup that includes considerations regarding tag copyrights.

With RDFa, there is no corporate entity or terms and conditions involved, which keeps things easy for that future strategy.

Your existing site probably has been safely created without needing to decide on this, however I suspect your next relaunch will have to decide one way or the other.