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

[dmitry_fedyuk (Dmitrii Fediuk)]

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

[Falco]

@dmitry_fedyuk

The tags should not be marked as a topic’s breadcrumbs.

Can you be more specific about why not?

[mitchellk (Mitchell Krog)]

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

[david (David Taylor)]

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.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

Your choice on this @neil.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

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

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

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?

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

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

[sam (Sam Saffron)]

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.

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

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?

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

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?

[codinghorror (Jeff Atwood)]

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.

[neil (Neil Lalonde)]

@codinghorror

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?

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