The recurring questions about microformats have short answers, and the shortest ones are the most useful.
Which microformats does Yandex support?
Two: hCard for contact information and hRecipe for recipes. Microformats exist for reviews, events, products and much else; none of those are processed here. Anything outside the pair belongs in Schema.org.
Will markup improve rankings?
No. Markup affects how a result can be presented, not where it appears. This applies equally to microformats and Schema.org.
Microformats or Schema.org?
The algorithms prefer neither. Yandex recommends Schema.org as the more modern, fuller and actively developed standard, but a working hCard implementation is not a defect to be corrected.
Both on one page?
Permitted. In practice, duplicating the same facts in two formats doubles the maintenance and the chance of them disagreeing, which is worse than either alone.
How do I check it works?
The structured data validator in the console reads both formats. Validation confirms parsing, not display: the data must also be indexed and, for partner-programme features, moderated before anything appears. Allow roughly two weeks after that.
Why is nothing showing despite valid markup?
The same three conditions as Schema.org — correctly marked, indexed, moderated — plus one specific to microformats: check that the class attributes carrying the meaning are still present. Because microformats ride on class names, a CSS refactor or a template migration can remove the markup while leaving the page visually identical.
The maintenance rule
Validate the contact page after every template change on a site using hCard. It costs a minute and it catches the one failure mode this format has that Schema.org does not.
How we apply this
We treat microformats as legacy: keep them working, build new markup in Schema.org. The class-name fragility is the reason. A developer tidying up CSS has no way of knowing that “adr” and “tel” are load-bearing, and nothing about the page looks different afterwards — so this is on our post-redesign checklist for every site that still uses it.
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