A category page for Google:
The same page for humans:
AI-generated summary
A discussion on Discourse hurting SEO by automatically adding the «Topics» suffix to HTML Title of category pages for Google. dmitry_fedyuk shares images to illustrate the issue, showing how a category page’s title differs between humans and Googlebot. Mittineague questions whether the “topic” suffix truly hurts SEO and points out an unusual routing structure on the mage2 site. dmitry_fedyuk suggests allowing administrators to set the HTML Title tag manually for categories. techAPJ reproduces the issue and proposes removing the “Topics” suffix for Googlebot. dmitry_fedyuk recommends manually setting a descriptive title for better SERP understanding. codinghorror agrees to remove the “topics” suffix but declines the manual title setting proposal. techAPJ implements the change via a GitHub commit, removing the “Topics” suffix for Googlebot.
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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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