The Mozbar, which is a popular tool for checking domain authority, has a new tab for microformats under their markup section. However from the official microformats.org website it is impossible to understand them.
I just want to know whether Google really prefers microformats over their structured data markup?
Google has been promoting Schema.org as the preferred vocabulary for structured data. According to their Structured Data Policies:
The data may be embedded in your webpage using any of three supported formats: JSON-LD, RDFa, and microdata.
I seem to recall Google used to read Microformats as well but can no longer find reference to it in any of their structured data guides. Microdata also seems to be the best documented of the three, but may change with the wind which seems to carry web standards.
Before structured data Google preferred microformats. They still do, but for things like last modified, quick overview of categories, site content update status, or other legacy knowns. It's almost real time, very quick index changes, with hubs to boot. Very much better to have these rather than ETAGS or 304 + AI trying to figure relevant changes.
Structured data has it place, and Google def does prefer it now for data semantics, schemas, mirroring, and relationships but the good ol microformats are still preferred for general updatability and indexifyingness. This may and will change in the future, but the legacy microformats will never really be "unsupported".
So what's the solution? Use them both! Add Atom as well, go all out
