Getting a forum to be indexed under Google's "Discussions" tab

Question

I'm building a forum software using node.js called NodeBB. I've been able to get Google to index the pages well enough, but I'm having trouble getting those results to show up in the Discussion tab like current established forum software.

I found a response to another SO question saying to use rich snippets. I've experimented around with it but with no luck.

It may be interesting to note that another next gen forum called Discourse seems to be having a similar problem (ex. discourse, howtogeek); I'm not sure if they have a solution for it either.

Answer 1

While I am unsure of what Google explicitly looks for regarding scraping of discussions, following the guidelines established by schema.org may help you tailor your site towards Google scraping.

Similar sites like Xenforo use these rich snippets/schema tags, and they are scraped properly... although other forums don't seem to do anything at all and yet get scraped properly anyway.