IP.Board has made use of micro formats and schema data since IP.Board 3.0. We added to this in 3.2 to include breadcrumb data in our navigation. This enabled Google to display our navigation links within search results.
The schema data has been read from our page which enables the green navigation links and post/author data.
We've further extended the schema data for 3.3 which is great news for SEO:
Many sites are generated from structured data, which is often stored in databases. When this data is formatted into HTML, it becomes very difficult to recover the original structured data. Many applications, especially search engines, can benefit greatly from direct access to this structured data. On-page markup enables search engines to understand the information on web pages and provide richer search results in order to make it easier for users to find relevant information on the web. Markup can also enable new tools and applications that make use of the structure.
Topics and posts
At the head of each topic, we've added schema information to the title and author details. This will help search engines locate the title of the topic.
We've also tagged up the posts to help search engines extract relevant information.
As we can see, Google can read this schema data very easily and quickly locates the data we want it to focus on.
Forum View
We've added schema data to the forum view also. This will help search engines locate relevant data. The screen shot below shows the data Google extracted from the forum view page.
As you can see, there is a row for each topic in the forum.
Events
We've added schema data to calendar events and even the sidebar 'Forthcoming Calendar Events' block so they display correctly when your site is searched. Here's the result of Google's rich snippets tool preview. Note the 'Meeting!' event underneath.
These unobtrusive changes should greatly assist search engines in locating relevant content which is good news for everyone!