If you have noticed Google is now showing post count, number of authors and last postdate in search results pages for listings from forums.



However, I saw that the data in majority of the results for my forum are incorrect. But it's not so in vBulletin results. They seem to be lot accurate. Wonder if we need to pass any special metadata to Google?

I think it more depends on the most recent date when Google visited your forums and indexed them, the same for any other type of forums.

In the current case, it's clearly seen that Google acts upon only the first page of the thread, "30 posts" are in the first page, and last post's date is taken from the message on this page, which is correct exactly for this page. I don't have ideas what does it mean "2 authors".

Just show us some kind of vBulletin example and maybe we will be able to figure something out then... I doubt there are some special meta-tags, but who knows...

It must be Google bug :)

Yes I'm talking about the cached version of the page.

Authors mean number of unique members who have participated in the discussion.

Here are some:





I have noticed that for minibb the authors field is incorrect most of the times.

Well...

"Number of unique members" - of course I got from the beginning what it means, may be I have a mistake in correct saying - I don't understand HOW this number is calculated, based on which criteria? vBulletin results regarding it are also not precise, for example in this "do you hate businessmen" thread, on the first page there are 14 unique members, Google counts only 12, probably not taking into attention 2 usernames which belong to moderators and are formatted with a different HTML code. I just have no ideas what kind of code Google interprets as a member code, it would be good to see kind of their reference or API or something else, without it I must be shaman smoking salvia and drumming, trying to figure that out.

Regarding number of posts and last date, I think, for miniBB it works correctly, the same way it works for vBulletin. But I think, for miniBB it would be good to achieve the same what happens on this "do you hate.." screenshot, i.e. when under the first thread page, there is listed the second...

Actually I was thinking about it long time ago already without knowing precisely what could be better, either to display page's number on the first page or not (because it was recently discussed too), because both cases in my opinion have pros and cons. Now I see it would be really better to not display page's number on the first page, and may be also add the wording "Page" next to it where it appears, because now this wording is available in language packs; previously it was not.

There are only two slight changes you may apply to your own forums and see what happens, before we implement it in the new official release this winter ;-)

Edit bb_func_vtopic.php and find this code:

change it to:

Also under bb_func_vthread.php, locate this code:

replace it to:

Currently I've changed it all on our own forums, so I'll watch what happens...

As you may know we don't really care about Google results and what's happening on the Google side, it's their own algorithms, problems and bugs, but from the theoretical point of view, this pagination principle may be still correct...

OK great!