Help Google to recognise forum threads

Question

I have seen some cases where Google search results can actually tell you how many posts/replies there are in a topic, how many pages there are, and I think I even saw it tell me the specific author of the post where my search result was, but I could be mis-remembering that one.

The point is, Google is apparently capable of recognising forum threads. However, it never seems to recognise my site's forum threads. Now, I am using an in-house, custom-built forum, so it may be that I'm simply missing flags or not formatting in a recognised manner.

So I'd like to ask, what is it that Google looks for to identify forum threads? What kind of data is it looking for, and how can I provide it?

Answer 1

Google automatically detects when sites are using common forum software and formats the display of the SERPs for all sites that use that forum software.

I would expect that Google would support a schema.org microdata markup for forum sites. However, there there is no microdata markup available that I could find. Here is a thread from Google product forums that indicates that the forum display in the SERPs is not part of the normal "rich snippets" enhanced display. Google must have written code to identify signatures of all common forum software. That makes it harder for custom built forums to figure out what needs to be done to get Google to recognize their forums.

The best that I can suggest would be to emulate existing forum software as best as possible:

• With each post, be sure to use the phrase "by AUTHOR".
• Use a date format that Googlebot is sure to recognize: Mon Jan 1, 1970 12:00 pm

• Use markup for each post similar to what existing forum software produces:

  <div class="post">
      <div class="postbody">
          <h3>THIS IS THE TITLE OF THE POST</h3>
          <p class="author">by <a href="author.html">AUTHOR NAME</a> » DATE </p>            
          <div class="content">
              BODY OF POST
          </div>        
      </div>
  </div>
  

• Use breadcrumbs with "Home", "Forum list", Topic list", "Topic items.

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Here is an article that shows how RDFa might be used to mark up forum HTML to make the task of scraping this data out of forums easier for Google. Using the RDFa markup proposed might make it more likely that would identify the site as a forum. Here is a great graphic from the article showing which items would get marked up with semantic data:

_{(source: technologyvoice.com)}

Answer 2

Google uses indicators to establish what the page is about, Numerous times Matt Cutts from Google's Ranking and Web Spam team has said there are hundreds of things that Googlebot's looks for when establishing page contents and how to rank it.

Without going into detail on every factor because this has been asked many times before in several other questions you should ensure that your pages have the absolutely basic:

• Titles
• Meta Descriptions
• Headers (h1, h2, h3)
• Content (The actual text that fills the page).
• Pictures ALT tags.
• URL Keywords (Optional, but again a indicator).

The list goes on and on, again forums are no different than any other page. But forums are classed as 'User Generated Content' which will be more on the radar for 'User Generated Spam' but this only becomes an issue when sites are not moderated.

Most open source forum content management system has SEO built in and in no way should you require a in house built to rank, millions of sites use open source with no problem what's so ever, so if you didn't rank using say for example 'PHPBB' then its because it was either setup wrong or your site is being punished for one reason or another, maybe it got slapped by Penguin or Panda, and Google's even new new Hummingbird algorithm which was released just recently.

Once again CMS engines have little to non role in actual rankings assuming they have the very basics SEO indicators in place, I'm willing to bet that your ranking issues assuming that you used a popular open source forum platform is nothing to do with indicators by the CMS but rather penalties from poorly made content or bad off site links.