The tags should not be marked as a topic’s breadcrumbs.
Only the categories should be marked as a topic’s breadcrumbs.
AI-generated summary
The discussion revolves around Google treating Discourse topic tags as breadcrumbs, which is not the intended functionality. dmitry_fedyuk points out that only categories should be marked as breadcrumbs, not tags. david explains that breadcrumbs are meant to be hierarchical, and including tags can cause confusion.
@neil agrees with dmitry_fedyuk and david and removes tags from the breadcrumbs. However, sam suggests that tags should still be included in the meta title tag to give them extra weight in search engine optimization (SEO).
@codinghorror disagrees, suggesting that only the first tag should be used in the title if there are no categories. neil questions the need to include keywords in the title for SEO, but codinghorror shares an experience from Stack Overflow where including keywords in the title helped prevent ripoff sites from outranking them.
@neil implements a solution where the most-used tag is added to the title if a topic is uncategorized.
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Can you be more specific about why not?
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I can’t see a problem with that. Every discourse forum I know ranks extremely well in Google
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Breadcrumbs are supposed to be hierarchical, describing the route a user takes to get to a page (comes from the story of Hansel and Gretel I believe).
Taking the first result in @dmitry_fedyuk’s screenshot - the arrows on the google search results make it seem like “webhook” is a subcategory of “Square”, “square” is a subcategory of “webhook”, and “payment” is a subcategory of “square”. This is clearly not the case, and could be confusing.
Categories are the hierarchical structure in discourse, so in my opinion tags should not be marked as breadcrumbs.
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Your choice on this @neil.
Agreed with @dmitry_fedyuk and @david. I removed tags from the breadcrumbs.
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Can we confirm though that the tags are still somewhere on the page? Perhaps they should be appended to the meta title tag or something?
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Oops yeah good point, although they’re not being crawled anymore according to robots.txt.
Sure, more about the “words” in the tag having some extra weight.
Currently title of topics is:
Import GitHub image as profile image when authenticating with GitHub - feature - Discourse Meta
It is probably desirable to amend so it is:
Import GitHub image as profile image when authenticating with GitHub - feature - pr-welcome - Discourse Meta
Additionally we got to make sure crawler view sees the pr-welcome word somewhere on the page.
No, I don’t think this is a good idea. Except in the case when there are no categories, the “first” tag could be used. Which tag goes “first” is debatable though.. most popular tag by count of usage?
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I’ve seen requests to drop the category from the topic titles. It’s duplication with the breadcrumbs, as @dmitry_fedyuk shows in the screenshot. Do we really need to stuff keywords (categories, tags) into the title for SEO?
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Yes, you do. We found this at Stack Overflow when ripoff sites would beat us with our own content – literally the same content, but stolen, and using the first tag as part of the title.
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This is done. If a topic is uncategorized, then the most-used tag will be put in the title.
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