Google Search Results Show "Instagram" as My Forum Name – Why?

Support
1

Hi everyone,

I’ve noticed that in Google search results, my forum displays the name “Instagram” instead of the actual forum name. Does anyone know what might be causing this?

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Some context:

  • My forum is hosted under the domain forum.evteam.pl.
  • I haven’t intentionally set anything related to “Instagram.”

Could it be related to metadata, cached content, or something else? Any advice on diagnosing and fixing this issue would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks!

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I had this issue once but with phpBB, not Discourse.

Google creates the site name from various information it can find on the site:

I added the recommended markup and the issue was resolved after a few weeks.

That said, I never encountered this problem with Discourse, so it feels like some cached result from Google :crystal_ball: :thinking:

Is your forum recent? Did you change the domain, or use another software prior to Discourse?

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Thank you for your response!

My forum is indeed recent—it’s only been live for a couple of weeks, and I haven’t migrated it from any other platform or domain. I’m using Discourse from the start.

I’ll definitely look into adding the structured data markup as you suggested. Do you think this could also be tied to how Google initially indexed the site? Or is it more likely related to metadata that might unintentionally mention “Instagram”?

Thanks again for your help!

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4

You can try adding this markup, but my bet is that the issue will resolve itself after some time, especially since Discourse has normally all the required tags used by Google to create a site title.

More like Google being silly.

Searching for “wrong site name google” on Google returns many, many similar issues.

As for me, it was a sports club forum, and the site title was wrongly set to “Dr-Ed-Mariano”, which had nothing to do with the forum, wasn’t even mentioned in the whole site.

Very, very weird, and the forum was many years old with no domain change.

My phpBB forum lacked the main tags used by Google to create the site’s title and Google algorithms probably messed up the title creation.

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Thank you for the clarification!

It’s reassuring to know that this might just be Google being “silly” and not necessarily something I misconfigured. I’ll still look into adding the structured data markup to ensure everything is properly set up on my end, but it’s good to know this might resolve itself over time.

It’s definitely strange how Google sometimes assigns completely unrelated titles, like in your case with “Dr-Ed-Mariano.” I guess patience is key here.

Thanks again for sharing your experience!

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