I’ve been doing a little research on how search engines react to semantic structuring of web pages.
I’m not particularly happy with the results so far. Not surprised, either, but I would have liked to have been pleasantly surprised, really.
I decided, firstly, to check how the search engines placed weighting on the cite tag.
I made 10 different pages of lorum epsum-style text, and added a two-word nonsense phrase to the first line of each.
5 of them I wrapped in a cite tag, and labelled ‘B’; the other 5 were left as normal text and labelled ‘A’.
I expected that if the search engines placed weight on the cite tag, the B tags would consistently appear above the A tag pages in a search for the phrase.

Results?
Only google is returning the pages, so far, and they don’t place weight on the cite tag – results right now are B B A A B A B B A A; it changes a little.
But there is pretty clearly no preference for the cite tags (B label) as more meaningful than plain text.
Darn it.