Discourse hurts the SEO by automatically adding the «Topics» suffix to HTML Title of category pages for Google

A category page for Google:

The same page for humans:

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Hmm can you repro this @techapj?

First, I’m not convinced that the presence of “topic” will “hurt” SEO

Second, and more importantly. it looks like the mage2 site has some odd routing / structure thing going on.

eg. (*note both “t” and “topic” in the URL)

Surely it is reproduced.
Here is the Meta:

Moreover, it would be very nice to have the ability for admistrator to set the HTML Title tag for categories manually (and without generic site name suffix too) because it has a lot of value for the conversion from SERP to the site.

Thanks, now I"ve found it

https://meta.discourse.org/c/extensibility/plugin

The title in the browser tab says
“Latest plugin topics - Discourse Meta”
but the HTML is

<title>plugin Topics - Discourse Meta</title>

Yes, I can repro this. For https://meta.discourse.org/c/bug

  • the title for humans is: Latest bug topics - Discourse Meta

  • the the title for Googlebot is: bug Topics - Discourse Meta

Should we change the title for Googlebot to: bug - Discourse Meta ?

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With the ability to set the category HTML Title tag manually a good title would be Report Bugs - Discourse or Bug Reporting - Discourse, so a SERP user will understand better the page meaning.

No, we won’t be doing that @dmitry_fedyuk – but I agree the word “topics” is useless to Google and should be removed @techapj.

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Done via:

https://github.com/discourse/discourse/commit/06c11a32354716a2230a342487ea8210b6c99838

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