Google wrongly treats the topics tags as breadcrumbs, because Discourse marks them so

Bug
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The tags should not be marked as a topic’s breadcrumbs.
Only the categories should be marked as a topic’s breadcrumbs.

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Can you be more specific about why not?

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I can’t see a problem with that. Every discourse forum I know ranks extremely well in Google

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Breadcrumbs are supposed to be hierarchical, describing the route a user takes to get to a page (comes from the story of Hansel and Gretel I believe).

Taking the first result in @dmitry_fedyuk’s screenshot - the arrows on the google search results make it seem like “webhook” is a subcategory of “Square”, “square” is a subcategory of “webhook”, and “payment” is a subcategory of “square”. This is clearly not the case, and could be confusing.

Categories are the hierarchical structure in discourse, so in my opinion tags should not be marked as breadcrumbs.

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Your choice on this @neil.

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Agreed with @dmitry_fedyuk and @david. I removed tags from the breadcrumbs.

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Can we confirm though that the tags are still somewhere on the page? Perhaps they should be appended to the meta title tag or something?

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Oops yeah good point, although they’re not being crawled anymore according to robots.txt.

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Sure, more about the “words” in the tag having some extra weight.

Currently title of topics is:

Import GitHub image as profile image when authenticating with GitHub - feature - Discourse Meta

It is probably desirable to amend so it is:

Import GitHub image as profile image when authenticating with GitHub - feature - pr-welcome - Discourse Meta

Additionally we got to make sure crawler view sees the pr-welcome word somewhere on the page.

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No, I don’t think this is a good idea. Except in the case when there are no categories, the “first” tag could be used. Which tag goes “first” is debatable though… most popular tag by count of usage?

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I’ve seen requests to drop the category from the topic titles. It’s duplication with the breadcrumbs, as @dmitry_fedyuk shows in the screenshot. Do we really need to stuff keywords (categories, tags) into the title for SEO?

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Yes, you do. We found this at Stack Overflow when ripoff sites would beat us with our own content – literally the same content, but stolen, and using the first tag as part of the title.

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This is done. If a topic is uncategorized, then the most-used tag will be put in the title.

5 Likes