Applying SEO settings to tags

[Damian_Boon]

Hi guys can anyone help me please, I am trying to SEO a Discourse site and finding it impossible to do. Can someone help me understand?

1. I have changed the category and tag meta titles which shows in a browser tab correctly yet if i view page source they say just “News”.

2. I have started to write some unique descriptions of each category and tag but for some reason Discourse strips everything for the Crawlers and they can’t see any of the text.

Here is some tag text i started to write to let people know this is an angler the tag is about yet Google cannot see it as it gets stripped off somehow.

Topics tagged darrell-peck

All i basically want to do is tell crawlers what the page is about and to get a better text in the search results for a decent CTR.

Am i missing something in the settings?

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Your categories and tags has nothing to do with SEO. Not too much headings either. Content per se has.

All of those beliefs are from SEO consultants who are trying to do simple things as difficult as possible to sell services.

Easy access, sitemap and decent content is what you need. After that you need visitors, because every visits impoves the value (because Google is following actions).

[Damian_Boon]

@Jagster

Your categories and tags has nothing to do with SEO. Not too much headings either. Content per se has.

I have to disagree, we did a test a while back after reading that Wordpress tags are useless for SEO. So what we did was internally SEO them and guess what - They got us roughly 9k uniques a month and became the some of the most visited on the site.

Regarding the headings i also completely disagree. What would you click on if these were in the search results

1. Topics tagged tom-jones
   Topics tagged tom-jones

or

2. Tom Jones - Discuss the Singers career
   Find discussions and topics related to Tom Jones, the singer who had an awesome career.

@Jagster

All of those beliefs are from SEO consultants who are trying to do simple things as difficult as possible to sell services.

I am with you on most stuff on the web but coming from a background of seeing with my own eyes how categories and tags are some of the most important aspects of a website what harm is it doing making them look better and letting google know what they are about?

@Jagster

After that you need visitors, because every visits impoves the value (because Google is following actions).

This is my whole point, not being able to do this would be LOSING tens of thousands of visitors.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Topic titles are what you want to improve. Not tags. Tags has zero values and is only way to bots to find content. And unneeded, because googlebot has very limited budget and it should save to sitemap.

[Damian_Boon]

@Jagster

Easy access, sitemap and decent content is what you need. After that you need visitors, because every visits impoves the value (because Google is following actions).

Forgot to say. Take this as an example, yes i get you need quality content but look at this scenario…

The quality content will be a topic on a tag so lets use David Beckham as an example.

The quality content would be topics i.e “How much is David Beckham worth” or “How many Goals Did David Beckham Score”

These get searched for 20k times a month.

Yet the tag in each would be “David Beckham” which gets 1 million searches a month. Why not try and seo that tag to make it clearer ?

[Damian_Boon]

@Jagster

Topic titles are what you want to improve. Not tags. Tags has zero values and is only way to bots to find content. And unneeded, because googlebot has very limited budget and it should save to sitemap.

Tags and categories have the most value and most searches. I can literally prove this for nearly every topic out there. Thats exactly why you tag a topic to help people discover what there interested in.

[Jagster (Jakke Lehtonen)]

Inside Dicourse, defenetly yes. But Google doesn’t care at all.

[Damian_Boon]

@Jagster

Inside Dicourse, defenetly yes. But Google doesn’t care at all.

Wow, where you getting this information from? That’s the worst statement I have ever seen to be honest.

Our tags on another site get over 20k uniques a month in a niche industry and that was just by changing the meta title and description of the tag

[HAWK]

Take a look at Discourse SEO overview (sitemap / robots.txt ). Also Handling SEO for Discourse Communities and 8 Tips to Improve Your Community’s SEO.

[Damian_Boon]

Thanks so much for the reply however I have read them, topics are fine and are getting indexed properly. The issue I have is with tags and categories.

Check here - Topics tagged Darrell-Peck

I have set the tag description as stated in

@Discourse

Meta Tags

In Discourse, the generic meta tags essential for SEO are auto-generated based on the content present on the page. The title tag, for instance, is derived from the site or topic title, and the description is generated from the content of the first post. However, customization on a per-page basis for metadata is limited. To alter these values, you need to adjust the settings or the content fields which they are generated from.

• The Title, Description and Short site description site settings
• The category names
• The posts’ titles and content
• And so on

Yet the actual meta title is rendered as

Also i have edited js.filters.with_category and js.tagging.filters.without_category as stated in this post

Meta Title & Description Change

What if I want to change that to something like “Discourse Bug Topics & Discussions” is there an option?

The browser renders the text in the tab correctly however it doesn’t change the actual meta title

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke (offline until 1 April))]

Thanks for reporting this @Damian_Boon. You are correct that Discourse does not currently show the tag description in the meta tags. It is done for categories, but not tags. Since this is an important part of SEO, I have logged a task to fix this up, and we’ll circle back here once it has been fixed and updated.

[Damian_Boon]

Thanks so much Hugh, is changing the title also a bug?

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke (offline until 1 April))]

The changing title is an interesting one - we’ll dig into that a little further.

Could you please clarify what you are expecting the title to show as on this page: Topics tagged Darrell-Peck?

The title I see in the browser is different to what’s in the page source - I believe those should match, so that’s something we’ll look into.

[Damian_Boon]

The title in the browser is what i expect to see (minus the - that tags add) in the page source. i believe this used to work as stated in this post

Meta Title & Description Change

What if I want to change that to something like “Discourse Bug Topics & Discussions” is there an option?

[Damian_Boon]

ideally we would be able to write our own in the tag settings however what we put in here basically should render in the page source

[Damian_Boon]

Is there any update on this itching to start writing all the tags seo

[pento (Gary)]

Thanks for pointing out this issue, @Damian_Boon!

I’ve just merged a fix for it, please give a try and let us know how it goes!

FIX: If a tag has a description, use it for the meta description.

[Damian_Boon]

This is awesome news Does the fix also include the meta title changes I’ll test when back

[hugh (Hugh Lashbrooke (offline until 1 April))]

There’s currently no option in the UI to set the meta title, so we didn’t change anything there.

Could you clarify what you’re looking for with the title? If it’s wanting to be able to set that in the tag settings, then that would be a new feature we would need to schedule in for development.

[Damian_Boon]

@Damian_Boon

Changing this applies it to the browser tab however i feel this should be the meta title for tags. It makes so much more sense and is 1000 times better for a decent CTR in Google

Also the same should be applied to the category meta title -

@Damian_Boon

this should be the meta title for categories.

However the best solution would be able to set the meta title and meta description on the edit tag page, these are so important and very overlooked. The tags and categories in any forum get the most searches so why not give us forum owners a powerful tool to help us get more traffic.