Do search engines read hCard Microformat data, or should I use Schema.org as well?

Question

At the bottom of my site I have a contact link which has hCard Microformat data attached to it. The data has the name, org, role, url, and email.

Should I also have a Schema.org type here for search engines, or will they read the hCard data and get confused?

Answer 1

It’s not uncommon to use several syntaxes (i.e., Microdata, Microformats, RDFa) in the same document. By using Microformats hCard and Schema.org, you are not just using different syntaxes but also different vocabularies (which is usually a good thing).

There is nothing in any related spec that would forbid it.

It cannot be ruled out that some search engines have a problem with it (but I’d consider them bad search engines in that case). And, of course, support also differs, so some search engines may only support Microformats, some only Microdata, some only RDFa, some a mix of them, and some nothing at all.

Answer 2

schema.org is preferred markup format for structured data and rich snippets as it is supported by Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Yandex.

Search engines do read every available semantic markup format on your website. Hence there is no harm keeping microformat but its good if you use schema.org as it is preferable now days.