Forums & Google Search Results

A forum administrator, Basak Kayik, posted a few questions in the Google Webmaster Help forum wondering how to improve his forum in the eyes of Google. Luckily the topic was picked up by Google’s John Mueller who responded to it in great detail. Now I have touched upon managing forums before in a slew of articles such as: Generating Traffic & Sales from Forums, and Advertising Your New Forums. Furthermore Google has also touched based upon forums in a previous thread in the Google Webmaster Help forum where John Mueller discussed how forum links can be viewed as spam. 

In the recent thread Basak asks the following questions:

• Breadcrumbs: Is it possible to change the way breadcrumbs are displayed in the search results? Should it be always in the way that how users navigate to the forums?
• Description: Is it possible to change the description in the snippet? For example if the questions is answered, it’s possible to mark it as answered in my forum. Can we change the description by the answer or what the forum is about?
• Vertical bar- Title:
  • Is it possible to add “Solved” to the title in the search result if the question is answered and marked as solved?
  • Is it possible to do some editing in the title? Can we change the order of things shown in results? First the name of the forum and title of the question maybe?

John Mueller responds to him with the following:

– Breadcrumbs: yes, breadcrumbs can make sense, they can give the user a bit of guidance in the search results. It doesn’t need to mirror the absolute structure within your forum, but it should be similar to what users see on the forum when they visit the thread. If you choose to implement them, make sure you’re using a format specified in our help center ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/185417?hl=en ) — the generic schema.org breadcrumbs aren’t supported on our side.

– The description is automatically generated based on the description meta tag, the content, and the user’s query. While you can specify more in the description meta tag (such as your information on the status of an answer), but it’s not guaranteed that the algorithms will choose to show that in search.

– Title: As with the description, our algorithms sometimes rewrite the title tag on the page, sometimes even depending on the query the user made ( https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?hl=en ). While it’s possible to add something like “solved” to the title, it’s also not guaranteed that we’ll show it in all search results.

Depending on your forum, it might make sense to allow the admins to rewrite the title or description. For example, if your forum provides product support, then instead of just taking a user’s question 1:1, maybe it could be transformed into something more generic, or easier to understand, for the title or description.

Another thing you didn’t mention, but which is common with forums is low-quality user-generated content. If you have ways of recognizing this kind of content, and blocking it from indexing, it can make it much easier for algorithms to review the overall quality of your website. The same methods can be used to block forum spam from being indexed for your forum. Depending on the forum, there might be different ways of recognizing that automatically, but it’s generally worth finding automated ways to help you keep things clean & high-quality, especially when a site consists of mostly user-generated content.