How does linkedin get grey microdata when searching a persons name?

[stacks21]

If you google any persons name who has a linkedin profile and then locate that entry in the search engine results (linkedin profiles are usually first page for most people) you will see that they get microdata indexed which is basically the persons location and headline from their profile.

Looking at their markup, i see location which makes sense as it is an hcard format, but I do not see any microformat data around the headline.

Any ideas how they get this?

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[Martijn_Scheijbeler]

As far as I know in some cases Google will directly try to crawl the right information from the LinkedIn pages when wanting that information. They probably do talk to LinkedIn to make sure they have the data in the right format.

[MattRoney]

I can't say for sure, but I would guess that Google is at this point familiar enough with LinkedIn to be able to pull information without much markup.

Plus, there are even ways individuals can pull information from LinkedIn. Check out Rapportive for GMail; it's pretty useful!

As Martijn said, it's also entirely possible that Google and LinkedIn work together in some capacity.