Rich snippets: microdata vs. microformat vs. RDFa

This post was most recently updated on December 28th, 2016

Schema.org: is a collaboration between Bing, Google, Yahoo and Yandex to provide for a set of markups that will be used by search engines to fetch rich and relevant search results.

You can use rich snippet tool to see what data has been extracted from your page and what will appear in the search and how.

Microdata: Google suggests microdata but microformats are also supported and accepted equivalently.

Microdata contains conventions as HTML attributes to label data as specific type of information- for example address, review, movies, events, business, etc. Each entity has its own properties. It uses simple attributes in HTML markup to assign descriptions to the data under a tag. Ex.

Microformat: Microformats are conventions known as entities used on pages to describe data under specific types. In general microformats use class attribute in HTML tags to assign brief and descriptive names to entities and their properties. Ex. 

RDFa: RDFa is a way to label content to describe specific type of information. Each entity has number of properties. In general RDFa uses simple attributes in XHTML tags to assign brief and descriptive names to entities and their properties.