How Do I Get Google To Better See Specific Threads?

[The Grand Potentate]

This isn't an SEO per se, but I'm having trouble getting the Googs to find my forum threads. In this specific instance, there is a thread ongoing that is about a very specific topic - Passaggio Cravatte. When you google search Passaggio Cravatte, we're on page 4, and it lists the date as the start of the thread (5/14) as opposed to the current posts. Ranked before us are pages from 2012 and 2013, and several other things that aren't current.

I wouldn't know an SEO from a hole in the wall, but this is obviously not helping my members that want to get this thread some more exposure. I noticed that the thread titles have to be more specific to the search, so I changed the title from 'The Passaggio Cravatte Scandal' to 'Passaggio Cravatte - The Scandal' to try to get it to better register. This seems to be a problem with many of our other threads as well. I'm trying a sitemap but that's not working as of yet. Any suggestions would be welcome.

Here's the forum thread for reference:

http://dressedwell.net/forum/threads/passaggio-cravatte-the-scandal-continues.814/

 

[ForestForTrees]

Check out the XenTag addon and Google "PageRank sculpting." We apply more tags to threads that are of higher quality because every thread has many outlinks, but very few inlinks. By adding more tags, you improve the ratio of inlinks to outlinks, thereby signaling to Google that it is a higher quality page. If you use tags like "top ten most viewed thread" and "Rambro's favorite thread," you can have a huge impact on the pagerank of your best threads.

You could also just have a list of "featured threads" on your homepage. This would be a complementary way of achieving the same effect. Basically, it's just way too easy for terrific threads to have very few inlinks, especially if they aren't on the first page of results for the subforum.