Google announced back in May that they will be supporting various micro-format schemes. They're apparently planning to use this to make search results more informative to users.

One thing they've found is that the more informative results tend to increase click-through significantly.

Here are a couple of links with references:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/05/goo...at-parsin.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogsp...-snippets.html

The Google Social Graph api uses the XFN microformat. You could think of XFN as a generation beyond the whole link or no-follow link issue.

I've used microformats for reviews and events but, always as an afterthought. I suppose now, when writing new posts, I'll should think about them upfront. Maybe, I should modify my CMS to integrate them appropriately.

thoughts?

I'm of two minds on it. On one hand, it makes sense that a user would click on a site that appears to be more informative. On the other hand, if they find what they're looking for on the search engine results page, why would they need to click the link?

I think the best approach is really to test it on a few select pages and see if it increases or decreases your CTR. I suspect that the trick will be to give them just enough information that they want to investigate further. It might help if you view it as an advertisement whose sole purpose is to get the click (which is how I view my meta-descriptions) because that's basically how it will function on the SERP.

Originally Posted by VirtuosiMedia

I'm of two minds on it. On one hand, it makes sense that a user would click on a site that appears to be more informative. On the other hand, if they find what they're looking for on the search engine results page, why would they need to click the link?

I don't think they find the info they want on the search results page, as much as, the info lets them know that the page more likely has what they are looking for.