How do I get Google to recognize blog comments as discussions?

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

My blog often receives 50+ blog comments per article, each on topic since I moderate them, but Google doesn't consider them a discussion. On the other hand I know of two forums in my niche who simply publish rss feeds of other blogs comments and they receive top rankings under Google's discussion section, I don't get it.

Visit Google, perform a site search, and click on discussions to see if your site has any at all. If it's a forum it should, if it's a blog and it does I'd love to hear about it.

Is Google picking up template signals to determine blog from forum? Probably but what's important, the date? the post number? something else such as a test for operating system by visiting cms specific pages?

I believe I have some extremely good discussions on my blog and Google isn't recognizing them as such, how can I fix that?

[deadsea]

We had some pages that were identified as being discussions when they were not. It appears that if you use the magic phrase

"posted by $author on $date"

then google will identify it as a blog and put it in the discussions

[Sgt_Kickaxe]

Did you have links to the author page or, as many forums do, convert the date link into a link to that exact post? Did the opening div for each individual comment have a unique ID number assigned? Some forum software appends something like id="td_post_1758815" to the tags.

I'm just wondering about specifics, and if it's worth it to get some mileage from comments since Google doesn't post comment stats in serps.

[deadsea]

We changed the page subsequently, so this is all from memory.

There were no unique ids in any of the id or class attributes. The title for each posting was an h2 with a link containing a unique id. Neither the author or date were links. The name was a first name space last initial. The date was in 'MMM d, YYYY' format (no time).