Improving SEO For Forum Search Results

In the screen cap below, you can see that Google sometimes displays additional information about links that link to a forum thread.

Several years ago, Google announced that it would sometimes format forum search results to display the post count, number of authors, and the date of the most recent post. This feature was described on the Google blog:

Today, we introduced a new search feature that makes it easier for you to find forum posts or discussions related to what you’re searching for. This new addition to Google search results applies to sites that tend to have a large number of posts on a specific topic. When several different discussions on a site are relevant to your query, we indent them under the primary result and include the date of each post.

Unfortunately, sometimes the meta data that Google displays is out of date. (I.e., the number of authors and/or posts is not accurate because more users have chimed in.) Once Google crawls a page it might not update the page again to reflect the latest discussion. What makes this problem challenging to fix is that Google does not disclose how it crawls forums or tabulates the current number of posts and posters. However, we theorize that one way to improve Google’s accuracy for forum results is to add the thread’s page number to the HTML title tag which currently includes the title of the thread and the name of the forum. We will test this theory and report the results after several weeks.