Google Webmaster Tools does not like topics description

All the topics have the same meta description and GWT doesn’t like it:

What about using an excerpt of the topic content instead?

3 Likes

I agree with this, @neil can you make it so meta description on topic pages uses the excerpt function (same one we use for pinned topics) for the meta description?

I know we did this for category pages with the category description courtesy of @djensen47’s suggestion and it worked great.

2 Likes

We already do that. Have a look. What is GWT complaining about?

I don’t think we do… I visited this topic with JavaScript disabled and I see

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" class="desktop-view not-mobile-device">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>Google Webmaster Tools does not like topics description - Discourse Meta</title>
    <meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport">
    <meta content="Feedback forum for the next-generation open source Discourse forum software" name="description">
    <meta content="" name="author">

I don’t think having the same description here on every Topic page is a good idea?

2 Likes

Hmm we might have a regression on the category page as well, when I visit /category/bug I see

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en" class="desktop-view not-mobile-device">
  <head>
    <meta charset="utf-8">
    <title>bug Topics - Discourse Meta</title>
    <meta content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1.0" name="viewport">
    <meta content="Feedback forum for the next-generation open source Discourse forum software" name="description">
    <meta content="" name="author">

I’m 99.99% sure the Description field here should be the category description…

1 Like

Oh I’m dumb, I had RSS on the brain. I was looking at RSS for some reason…

Yeah let’s make sure these descriptions are actually excerpts on topics. And particularly on the categories, the description should be the standard category description.

3 Likes

Done and done. Enjoy, crawlers.

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