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No I don't have any experience with this, but I noticed SEOMoz also has a vanity URL  -- I tested a few other big companies with local presence to see if any there was any correlation, all had the vanity URL.  How do you get the G+ vanity URL?  I'll do it and see if I experience anything similar

Hey If you consider what a low quality page actually is tiny amount of content no content spammy near duplicate external duplicate internal duplication created by CMS etc Then, really, a forum post should not really be low content as it should be relatively unique due to the various inputs from different folks. That said, I don't see forums doing so well as they may once have done and you do need tight moderation for it to be effective. Really, I would try to think of this outside of the SEO mindset and if it adds value for your visitors AND you can handle the inevitable management then it should be a good idea. If you are adding it purely for search and landing pages, then some smart blogging may be a better option. Hope that helps Marcus

if you do make sure it is  cross-domain rel="canonical" http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/2009/12/handling-legitimate-cross-domain.html If you have 301ed it I would not worry about the .net dupes

Ok I see, understandable - thanks for posting the Rich Snippets data instead. In our experience, Google isn't showing stars in the SERPs for Organisations/Corporations, but they are for Places. This makes it possible to use schema.org's LocalBusiness with your company reviews, for which Google is showing stars in the SERPs, and this is how we've seen many companies serving up their ratings. To my mind, it's perfectly legitimate to use LocalBusiness on pages that relate to real world locations, on your homepage if you have a single location, or on outlet-specific pages for businesses with multiple locations. My assumption would be is that Google first interpreted your aggregate rating data as relating to a product, which is why you got stars showing. They subsequently determined the data was related to your organisation instead, and removed the stars. I have absolutely no idea whether this would have been algorithmic or manual, but I've certainly seen a bit of a cleanup in the SERPs in recent weeks, and murmurings in the SEO world to that effect too - see http://www.seroundtable.com/less-google-rich-snippet-15216.html for one example.