Like all paranoidical (if there is such a word) bloggers, I like my blog to be as SEO complaint as I can possibly make it to be. So I follow SEO blogs and read their articles like the Bible. SEO is also included in my Google Alerts lest I miss out on the latest development. Though I don’t necessary follow each and every tip I read because I lack the knowledge and resources to implement most of it, I try to keep up. In all the SEO advise and tips I have read, pathetically, I have never come across the word, ‘Dublin Core’, What the heck is Dublin Core and what the heck have it got to do with SEO.
According to this article,
Dublin Core is a metadata standard, even though the use of Dublin Core meta-tags could increase the pages prominence in search engine retrieval lists.
Even though I don’t fully understand the whole explanation given, the mention it could increase the pages prominence in search engine retrieval lists. is good enough for me to start searching for something that could do that Dublin Core ‘job’ for my blog.
It looks like I am the out-dated one after all. There is and has been quite a long list of available WordPress plugins that does this automatically during the whole while when I was living in ignorant bliss.
You don’t even have to guess what I did.
What steered the interest in this Dublin Core thing all of a sudden was due to this post about WooRank at Techcrunch. It states that
WooRank evaluates Web sites based on 50 criteria in an automated fashion, free of charge, and provides helpful SEO and other tips.
What else do you expect from a guy who has a fetish for anything that has the words ‘free of charge’ attached to it? That was where I discovered that I had Dublin Core missing in my On Site SEO analysis. That is very bad for my male ego and I don’t like to live with a deflated ego. It hurts my sex life.
I have never heard of Dublin Core before either and truthfully I understood very little from the linked article. Maybe I should do some research as well!
Government websites are the only single group of sites that love DC. No major search engine uses them. I am tired of writers who lazily refer to “some” search engines that allegedly use DC tags but they never seem to name them.
Until Google starts using them for ranking purposes, I am happy not to.
Dublin Core is aimed at use within governments and high level enterprise through projects such as HonCODE. There are aggregation engines for DC related metadata which then share their data pool with the likes of Google. So it’s indirect aggregation to Google, but aggregation nonetheless.
DC based metadata can be also transformed effectively into RDF / RDFa / microformats as necessary which Google has now been honouring for the last 17 months with Rich Snippets.
As Google will honour Rich Snippet microdata, the easiest place to get the richest feature set for that metadata is Dublin Core.