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Does anyone bother with Dublin Core anymore?

Asked 2009-03-15T22:04:50.753
15

As the question states, is there any point adding Dublin Core meta-tags to your HTML head? Or has sitemap.org removed the use for most of this (though it only replaces some of the tags)

I ask this as most sites I visit don't seem to use DC metatags in their source.

I'm interested in whether I need them for a site that will be used mostly for developers, however the discussion can be broader than this category.

To quote Google (from 2002):

"Currently we don't trust metadata because we are afraid of it being manipulated"

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2 Answers

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META tags are not the only place you can put DC metadata. You can integrate it more with HTML using RDFa.

Now, as for proliferation — well, the only incentive it currently gives to webmasters is satisfaction for job well done, but does not yet affect SEO. As soon as this changes, you'll see outburst of sites tagged with RDF and microformats. And it will come. Yahoo already started working on that: http://ysearchblog.com/2008/03/13/the-yahoo-search-open-ecosystem/

answered 2009-03-17T13:04:59.927
2

I was looking on the web for information about the Dublin Core and if search engines used them and I came across the academic paper "Search Engines and Resource Discovery on the Web: Is Dublin Core an Impact Factor?" by Mehdi Safari:

http://www.webology.ir/2005/v2n2/a13.html

To quote his conclusions section: "it was found that using Dublin Core elements did not improve the retrieval rank of the web pages" and that "Dublin Core metadata, as a well-known metadata schema, is not widely accepted and used by search engine designers and the spiders do not consider its elements while ranking the web pages".

This was back in 2005, but I am assuming this is still true.

answered 2010-08-04T18:35:32.430

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