The Core

I have been jumping ion the microformats bandwagon recently (its a bit slow but I thought it was worth giving it a go). I'm basically speccing them into all new sites, at least for biogs, articles with any level of profound thinking, products etc. (I know you can upload to Google Products and have them treat stuff as marked up, but I work on the basis there's vertical search and other search engines outside of Google.

Is anyone else doing this and seeing any obvious benefits? Since I'm only doing it on new builds at present my projects are mostly still not live and where they are I haven't seen instant extra links in the SERPs or leaps in rankings. I presume though that it will take a while and additional links will update periodically rather than immediately?

I'm also not entirely settled on the best formats to use at the moment - anyone have any arguments for or against certain ones?

I haven't got any showing yet. I think though that it does only show them for certain things at the moment - product markup isn't shown in the UK but is now live in the US I think (no obvious improvement to product feed products shown/ctr because it's backed up by tags on the landing page).

People markup does show in the UK (see linkedin in SERPs for examples) but I haven't got the site with marked up biographies on it live as yet, will be another couple of months.

Google launched recipe markup a couple of months ago in the US, so not sure if anyone else here is exploiting that one yet. Its pretty poor results  though (google.com, search banana cake, add and remove ingredients, most notably bananas, and see what happens to results returned). If they get it right some of these have huge potential though - the recipe calorie count filter could help drive a load of traffic if you can get marked up appropriately if people start using it, I imagine, every other 'extra' which we get first in the SERPS (sitelinks, star ratings, google checkout) increases CTR at least for the first few months.