Thanks for confirming that I can eliminate that.
I did research before opening this thread but wanted to be sure that there wasn’t something Discourse specific that I was missing/overlooking.
But yes, ruling that out, the reasons behind Google’s choices are one or more of these:
- Higher User Engagement on the Forum: applies due to comments, which also add content expansion.
- Domain Authority and Freshness: applies because the blog’s domain was changed < 1 year ago when this started happening. Before that, the old 12 yr old domain had a much higher DA rating, so blog was always preferred by Google.
- Internal or External Linking: applies because of things like automation of the similar topics on pages helps with that on forums.
- Just Google’s own Indexing Behavior: due to algorithms and how it selects preferred pages. We can only influence that to a certain extent.
- Click-Through Rate (CTR): I tend to click on search results that are from forums, Reddit, etc. more than news articles or blog posts. So could be related also due to forum CTR possible being higher for those pages.
Yes, i will make some minor improvements on the blog’s side. But the rest will just have to solve itself over time. Hopefully, this thread will be helpful to others who notice similar.