Several month ago, Google started showing special meta data in search results for popular forums like vBulletin and phpBB, like how many posts in a topic, the last date of the last post, etc.

Unfortunately since every forum type is different, younger forum types were left out, including bbPress. I tried to find the right person to contact at Google to help them add bbPress, but to no avail.

However I was very pleased to notice tonight that Google is suddenly showing meta info for sites using bbPress forums!

Here is a search example:

http://www.google.com/search?&q=site%3Abbpress.org+forums+browser

Here is a highlighted snapshot in case you have no idea what I am taking about:

http://img144.imageshack.us/img144/9336/googlebbpressdetectionok7.png

It’s only working on a handful of sites using bbPress at the moment but hopefully that will grow and this is a very good sign.

[@ganzua Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Mmmmh… in my forum, google indexed the information that the header was showing when the thread was posted; date, web age, moon phase, hit counter count and next, the thread title and the title of the first sticky Great work.

Now, is there any bbpress plugin that can insert meta tags in the wp header after a deep integration? just like the all in one seo wp plugin?

[@malice Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Sounds marvelous.

My pages probably need some recrawling before it turns up though.

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Google is probably still sorting out the algorithm.

Because templates can be customized endlessly, it’s hard to find patterns sometimes.

You’ll notice it only appears on some topics, not all:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Abbshowcase.org+inurl%3Atopic+copy

[@timskii Member 15 years, 10 months ago]

Google’s counter appears to be capped by the number of posts per page, in my case 20.

For example, the first result here shows “20 posts”, yet the topic runs to almost 400.

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Yeah they do that for vbulletin and phpbb too, so I suspect it’s a problem they have to work out.

[@sambauers Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

Do you think we could add some custom meta data to bbPress standard HTML to report this stuff in a machine readable way for them?

[@_ck_ Participant 15 years, 10 months ago]

I tried for a little while to figure out how they were doing it and realized they are just counting CSS markers. I also tried to find the right people in Google to talk to about this to no avail.

I think they would worry about blackhat SEOs manipulating this so they aren’t giving details.

bbPress clearly gives such meta info at the start of each topic, so unless someone radically changes their templates, it’s already in there.