Vcard profile attribute guidance would be great. :)

Jazajay

Active Member
Right with my recent wave of learning CSS3 I also thought I would bring into the fold a few other techniquies that up to now I have not properly explored, namely HTML5 and microformats.

So I came across that if you use a Hcard, a way of representing busniesses or people on-line, that you should place the profile attribute on the Head tag as in ~

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

Now a Vcard is the way of expressing the Hcard or is the root name for it, is this correct?

So if I specify a Vcard I should then be adding the profile attribute to my Head tag, or one of the other ways of doing it, right?

Cheers for any ideas all welcome.
Jaz :)
 
I know you're all for new stuff but wouldn't it be quicker to just have a link to a vcard stored on the server or is there specific seo benefits to using hcards?

From my quick reading and browsing of site with it the hcard appears to need converting (external or on site) before it will download as a vcard.

All the user has to do with a vcard is click on the link and download then add it to the required program etc.
 
I thought a Vcard was a way of displaying info about the busniess or organization in a computer readable format?
For example ~

<div class="vcard"> //Starts the Vcard
<div class="org"><i>Roger Needle Quality Window Cleaning Services.</i></div> //Tells the user agent this is the company name
<div id="add"><i>We are located at</i></div>
<div class="adr"> //Starts the address section
<span class="street-address"><i>30 Warwick Road, Sutton Coldfield,</i></span> //Tells the user agent this is the street address
<span class="locality"><i>Birmingham,</i></span> //Where the locaility of the address is
<span class="region"><i>West Midlands,</i></span> //Which region it is located in
<span class="postal-code"><i>B73 6ST,</i></span> //The post code
<span class="country-name"><i>England.</i></span> //The country the organization is in
</div> //Ends the address section
<div class="tel"><i>01213552605 07941126852</i></div> //The telephone number
</div> //Ends the Vcard

And from the documentation it says I should link to the profile so user agents can understand it or something like that, on any page that uses it, similar to the DTD which tells user agents about the A tag and it's allowed attributes etc.....

SEO benefit TBH didn't think of it as it's more of a way for me to tell user agents that thats contact info you know. That said Local business SEO is by far my baby. :)

More in the way of me being prepared for future user agents TBH, and cough future SEO benefits. ;)
 
hcard is basically vcard (which is really just plain text) with html markup from what I was reading. It's even called a vcard in the class.

It might be useful for search engines (thats your area) but I would have thought they would read a plain text address just as well (well mine is found in a search) although region might be useful admittedly.

As I said before all the all the sites I looked at that had it appeared to link to a conversion site and the hcard then downloads were in vcf format (vcards).

Now adding in your less code the better approach having a single link (on each page even) to a vcard (a readily used and universal format) and normal text would be better wouldn't it?

If you look at your bit of code all thats really being added to the text is a class definition which you could use anyways if you wanted although div class="address" might be easier and I'm sure would be in any new spiders worth their salt :)

Harry may have more insight into the finer workings of it but to me it just seems like excess code at the minute (this is your fault for getting me into minimal coding :p).

edit: google and yahoo (and I assume bing) can read vcards now supposedly (link) and it looks like hcards are used on google maps so maybe some local seo benefits
 
Huh totally missed that, lol, guess I was off sick that day but another reason why you should always be ahead of the game, or in this case think you are. :D

O don't get me started on the code I was like err.......huh. But thats the right coding for it from what I was reading at ~ hCard 1.0 Microformats Wiki and even though I would love to shorten it some things are just out of my hands, Harry will be glad to know. :D

Can you show me where I can link to it though and I'll have a butchers?

Thats funny I have just been through all my old SEO newsletters the last few days and assigned them colour coded stickers to which bit of SEO it refers to for the more advanced techquies so I can refer to them quicker and deleted like 95% of them as they covered SE news and the basics, it wasn't in that 95% of them and bare in mind it took me days to go through them as the oldest ones dated back to 07. Some are even dedicated to local SEO and not 1 of them mentioned it. :confused:

Mmm...thinking about it I signed to the Local SEO ones after May of 09 so may have just missed it then, before then I just wasn't intrested I suppose, crap!!!!! lol.

O well good to know I've been doing it anyway. :D

It's just like my life as in I normally just blunder though it anyway, lol.
Sigh. :(
 
not sure what you mean by link but the conversion service is here - not a lot going on really.

and tut tut on missing an seo trick :p
 
O yeah for that to work you have to actually have the Hcard on a site, you then type the site address in and it downloads it for you. Huh mine doesn't download I'll have a look over it as I'm sure it's coded properly TBH.

Yeah I did some research into its SEO benefits, and TBH it's not used if you put it on your site, slightly more complicated than that, if it's on another site and the info goes in it counts sort of like linking as in it's easy to fool the search engines if you could create your own and still is, but if someone else uses it then it's "independent".

Here's what Google says :
Google is experimenting with markup for business and location data. We do not currently display this information, unless the business or organization is part of a review.
It may be used in the future though when browsers catch up, harder to fool then, but at the mo, not great. That said I'm going to start using it and on 1 site that has other ppl contact info on as well as their own.

But I was thinking it's meant to make contact info machine readable but how is that example machine readable?
It's not it's in a human readable format and extremely bloated. A machine wouldn't care if it was called pc for post-code and a much lower chance it would run into conflict of interest with modern naming conventions.

But hay guess machines aren't that clever, or efficient, if they need long names, or is it us humans? Huh. :confused:
 
So basically at this moment in time its not being used but it may be worth coding it in anyways.

How does a screen reader read it or is that what the bottom bit on about
 
Yeah for local pretty much, but other user agents, none off the top of my head, should be able to pick it up, eventually anyway.

Screen readers not sure to be honest.
Probably will just ignore it as it's new and screen readers aren't cheap and most are not free, there are some that are though, but the main players aren't so ppl don't upgrade that quickly. Imagine having to pay hundreds just to upgrade from FireFox 2 to 3, would you?

So they probably just read it as normal text TBH. :)
 
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