Hi all, I’m running a Discourse forum and need help with a major SEO + indexing issue after a rebuild. What Happened: My original Discourse forum crashed, and I lost around 10,000 topics. I rebuilt the forum from scratch, keeping the same domain and same Google Search Console (GSC) property. …

In postgres you could manually set the topic ID sequence to a high value, e.g. 20000, so that new topics start at that number: SELECT setval('topics_id_seq', 20000, false); [image] MihirR: My original Discourse forum crashed You lost the server itself? :cry:

Yup the whole db too. So I did make a new one, so it already have around 6000 topics so should I from now onwards make it from 20k ?

Ideally you would have done that as soon as you created the new site, but it’s too late now. Better late than never - if that sequence is currently at 6000 and you set it to 20000, the next new topic will have ID 20000 instead of 6000.

So it would be like 1-5999 and then 2000 and so on? Right? And hope this won’t cause any issue on further stages? Or shall I just leave this and with time new topics would overwrite the old one?

The advice is addressing your complaint that old topic IDs are being “reused”. Bumping that sequence up to 20000 will prevent any topics between 6000 and 19999 from being created.

Strategies to resolve indexed URL conflicts in Discourse

Product Support

MihirR (Mihir) June 4, 2025, 6:52pm 7

Yes, let’s say if it even overwrites with time like 6000 and so on with new topic urls this won’t cause any issue, or can it break something in future.

Topic		Replies	Views
How to remove/hide topic IDs from discourse topic URLs? Product Support	3	822	July 8, 2020
Google Search Indexing and Discourse Data & reporting	9	4018	June 9, 2020
Import keeping old post ids in Discourse Migration kunena	9	996	October 22, 2018
Removing the /2, /3, /4, etc links for each reply within a topic URL Development seo	33	4710	October 13, 2024
Incomplete topic titles beginning with a number can have odd behavior Product Support	5	1440	June 5, 2020

Strategies to resolve indexed URL conflicts in Discourse

Related topics