Today I did a search and saw this:
A Google search that is bringing in forum information - from vbulletin!
Why do companies continue to not use off the shelf tools, to build their own CMS / Blog / Forum, I don't know.
By using a highly popular platform for your content delivery, you'll likely: 1 - Cut costs & open yourself up to a larger developer pool in the case you need development help 2 - Make it easier for Google to parse your data
I'm going to get into more detail about point #2 Google knows that it can hit the a large portion of the market maybe 40-80 percent of content delivered on blogs/forums (I'm pulling this out of my you know what) if it can EASILY parse the vbulletin / phpbb for your forum or wordpress / typepad for your blog.
That is exactly what you are seeing above, now lets think about how Google might use this parsed data...freshness maybe!?
If they can slice up # of authors, last post, number of replies, comments, etc in your posts (whether on or a forum or blog) it will give just one more indicator on how fresh a forum or blog is and could be used someday to impact rankings -stale forum that gets few unique posts, very infrequently could equal = poor forum which could = poor rankings.
Being fresh off of my SMX East kick - now its time to think...how can this data be scraped, and if so, what would it tell us? Maybe you only advertise or sponsor forums that have high "freshness"? Again I am thinking out loud here, how else could this information be used?
The folks over at blogoscoped are talking about it too.
