Should I be concerned about hAtom tags on my blog?

Question

I am using a theme that automatically adds hatom-entry, hatom-feed classes on my WordPress blog.

I read that such tags/classes should be used for syndicated content.

Anyway, then I ran a Rich Snippet Tool, which threw a "HAtomfeed" error. So I removed a "hfeed" div tag.

Now, should I be concerned? Can this cause any problems? I still have a couple of these classes (listed below), and I just hope they do not effect my site's ranking.

For now, these are the tags the Rich Snippet Tool has detected:

• hatom-feed
• hatom-entry
• entry-title
• entry-content
• published
• author
• fn
• person-name
• url

Edit: All the content on this weblog is unique and written by me and others. Thought I'd share that.

Answer 1

According to http://www.xfront.com/microformats/hAtom.html, the required hAtom properties are:

• entry-title
• updated
• published
• author

You don't say that you have the "updated" property, but you also didn't say that you removed it. As long as you have the required properties, it should be valid micro-format markup.

Even if the micro-format markup wasn't valid, it shouldn't cause SEO problems. Google sometimes uses valid micro-format markup to enhance the SERPs, but I've never heard of them penalizing for the use of invalid markup.