Google has been testing new search results which include specific details on forum threads including the number of posts in an indexed forum thread, the number of authors posting, and the date of the last post. This new Google enhancement shows that the company is actually identifying the technologies powering the forums, and with the ability to index and serve data on these forum threads, perhaps using these participation metrics as a form of algorthmic ranking.
What does this tell me about Google? It tells me that three distinct conversational relationship metrics are being identified :
1. Posts : The amount of posts are significant because the content in these posts fortifies the original question or conversation, and by looking at the amount of content, the user can select whether or not to click on a Google link dependent upon the posts in the conversation on the target page.
2. Authors : The number of authors shows a diversity in conversation and sources of conversation. More authors can mean more information, debate or augument on a topic, which in research, can be quite useful. More authors can also mean that the concept of the post is thought provoking and led to group conversation or group problem solving.
3. Last post : Do you want to read a forum post about Ajax SEO from 2003? Or from 2008? The last post metric adds a freshness factor to the results which can be used by the end user to prequalify information before clicking on the Google result. From a Google Algorithm perspective, fresh content is always useful, so looking at the search rankings, one may want to see how Google is using these metrics to rank.
Hattip to User NameCheck
|Is this shows Google tries to give importance on personal branding?
I think this has been the case for a very long time now. I have seen such data for vbulletin forums since months now. It’s not new.
I’ve also seen this kind of results for a long time now, nothing new here.
This seemed to be common knowledge for a while now i though.
Ive seen it for months now.
Its a nice feature to have as saves time looking at a thread with no replys
I would really love to see something implemented in Google using the same idea with blogs. The ability to show the comment participation and blog date freshness in the normal Google results would be outstanding.
Is this tied to a particular version of forum ? Has google released any documentation about this stuff ?
Loren, this is pretty old. See http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/018445.html
Ya, I had this in a presentation I did about a year ago.
The fascinating thing to me, is that this is covering many different forum systems. In other words – someone at Google is writing specific routines to rip that data out from specific sites. If they are doing it for that many different forums, then how many specific scrappers do they have for the general web as well? eg: not 1 gbot/indexer algo, but thousands.
They must have a very celver algorithm for parsing the forums data that works even on forums that don’t use any common forum software. On my pretty unimportant website, which isn’t even in English, I have a forum that I wrote all code for, I’m not using a single piece of code from any other forum software and I haven’t used it on any other website; despite all that, Google knows it is a forum and it shows the info about authors and posts in the search results. Interesting.
Good to know – I started a forum today at one of my other sites…
I just wish they’d take the “last post” date into account when serving results. I’m learning Django/Python and end up Googling at least one error message or code question a day. 99% of the time, the top 10 results are from 2007 — not at all helpful, because the language has changed a lot since then. I have to switch to an advanced search every time, which is obnoxious because I doubt a forum post from 2007 on most any topic should trump more recent information.
Informative post on Forum posting, thanks a lot for sharing such information with us.
Alright Loren,
The beginning of this project yes has started a while back. That is OK though I have noticed our board has been contently getting hit and hit hard this past weekend.
Hot quite sure what is going on but it is totally noticeable. You see we run a blog linking system with strict spam rules and we heavily moderate the board.
Genuine valuable content rules. People are getting their articles indexed in just a matter of hours. What ever Google is up to with forum boards so far it has been great.
Forums have a forgotten value, many are looking at them again.
Brad West ~ onomoney
This french blog showed another google test relied to forums in SERPs :
http://referenceur.wordpress.com/2009/02/10/google-et-les-resultats-des-forums/
It’s similar to Site Links display :)
How can we optimize forums to get a similar display ?
Thank you
thankks you
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