: Would using RDFa improve ranking/traffic? My website is a legal search engine, lawmirror.com, and there are about 600k records available online. Currently using XHTML5 and on some pages Microdata.

@Shanna517

Using structured data (e.g., via Microdata or RDFa) is not a direct ranking factor, but it can lead to more traffic (for example, because of Rich Snippets in the SERPs).

However, if you already are using Microdata (probably with the Schema.org vocabulary), and you would now add RDFa, this would only benefit those consumers that only understand RDFa but not Microdata. For those consumers that support both syntaxes (like Google Search), using RDFa in addition to Microdata (where both add exactly the same structured data) should not change anything.

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@LarsenBagley505

No using RDFa, microdata, richsnippets, and HTML5 does not help your rankings in search engines. If you use Google rich snippet testing tool they'll actually tell you if a page will potentially appear in search results with rich snippets or not. For example a page using hCard but with a lot of other content on that page google may determine the main relevancy of the page doesn't support using hCard in search results. You can have the most well validated pages, using the latest schemeas and even the ones in beta, all that will not help you rank higher.

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