Change separator in browser title

Hi,

We would like to change the separator in the browser title meta tag to us • as the separator rather than -

How would we do that?

Thanks in advance

What do you mean by “browser title meta tag”?

I am unaware of any such tag.

If you are talking about the title tag inside the head, it isn’t possible to change it atm.

That’s what I first thought might have been meant. But the title tag does not have dash separators except between Category and Site. eg.

<title>Change separator in browser title - support - Discourse Meta</title>

And those aren’t displayed anywhere that I know of so I don’t see any point to changing them.

It is show on the tab name on the browser isn’t? Also Google results.

1 Like

Ah, right you are.

My tabs are always to narrow to show much. But they do indeed show in SERPs

3 Likes

@Falco @Mittineague - yep, that is the one I am talking about, the page title in the headers. Our main site uses • as it is shorter and allows us to get more content into the header (recommended by Yoast for SEO). Not that I am that bothered about it or think that it makes a massive difference - mainly just want it to be the same on our new forum as it is on the main site…and don’t want to change the main site.

So there is no way to do that currently at all?

No clean way.

Technically you can use a sed/awk command on the container bootstrap process but you need to really want this to go down that router.

Haha yeah I don’t really want it - but I mean I just hate having them different for aesthetic reasons.

Although I am not a sadist - and I am not very good at coding - so will probably avoid anything too involved.

How to we add SEO tools etc as a feature request?

Agreed.
You could try hacking Core files, but that could quickly become a maintenance nightmare.

views/layouts/crawler.html.erb

<title><%= content_for?(:title) ? yield(:title) + ' - ' + SiteSetting.title : SiteSetting.title %></title>

views/layouts/applicaton.html.erb

<title><%= content_for?(:title) ? yield(:title) + ' - ' + SiteSetting.title : SiteSetting.title %></title>

No need for any.

IMHO Discourse does well as it is.

Or have you personally experienced a problem that could be addressed?

1 Like

@Mittineague - I disagree with “no need for any” with pretty much every web thing, SEO included. There is always someone who needs this stuff (or in my case, wants it so that it moulds cleanly into an existing environment).

Please provide at least one specific example where you would have Discourse do SEO differently than it already does.

Yeah, but this is just aesthetics, you don’t get to wave the “important because magic SEO reasons!” :star2: wand around for this, sorry :wink:

4 Likes

@Mittineague - don’t have one as I only installed it yesterday :slight_smile:

@codinghorror - I wish I had a wand! haha. But seriously - my reason is just for aesthetics sure…but that does not mean that SEO is a one-size fits all solution…it is also often a large collection of small changes that create a greater whole. Just take a look at Yoast SEO plugins for Wordpress, as well as their blog - there are a lot of things included there which are lacking…as well as what I would call “social SEO” - for example the ability to add opengraph data, the ability to change twitter card types twitter cards and stuff like that.

Unless I am missing something, we currently can’t do that?

But hey - these are just suggestions to make life easier. Your software is awesome and it is the best forum software I have ever seen (and was a pleasure to install)…so thanks.

2 Likes

I don’t know about “changing”, is what is already there incorrect?

<meta property="og:site_name" content="Discourse Meta" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://meta.discourse.org/t/change-separator-in-browser-title/42940/12" />
<meta name="twitter:url" content="https://meta.discourse.org/t/change-separator-in-browser-title/42940/12" />
<meta property="og:title" content="Change separator in browser title" />
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Change separator in browser title" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Please provide at least one specific example where you would have Discourse do SEO differently than it already does." />
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Please provide at least one specific example where you would have Discourse do SEO differently than it already does." />
<meta property="og:image" content="https://d11a6trkgmumsb.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mittineague/100/40997_1.png" />
<meta name="twitter:image" content="https://d11a6trkgmumsb.cloudfront.net/user_avatar/meta.discourse.org/mittineague/100/40997_1.png" />