How to optimize Google Site Description / Results for News Plugin/ Discourse Site

[angus (Angus McLeod)]

Hey @BCHK

@BCHK

Is it possible that ThePavillion’s News Plugin I use to make my site into a “blog” on the home page - causing problems for google?

No. The news plugin will not affect the content your website serves to Google’s crawlers.

@BCHK

but this issue seems to be under Discourse’ control.

As others have pointed out in different ways, it’s not really up to Discourse. Discourse provides a meta description tag, and yours is appearing in the head of https://www.rapamycin.news as expected. It’s up to Google to decide what to do with that.

<meta name="description" content="Rapamycin and Anti-Aging Medicine Users&#39; Group Discussion Forum">

@BCHK

@j127

If there is a way to insert a paragraph of custom text above the table in the bot view, then Google might show that instead of the table rows,

Exactly - I think this is the type of simple solution that would solve the issue for everyone. What seems to be needed is an “alt” site description for the table view that google is generating.

The key word here is “might”. As @j127 pointed out, the text Google displays under your search result is relative to both what is searched, and other variables that Google decides are important. Trying to reverse engineer the Google algorithm to achieve a specific kind search result display is a rabbit hole. The only way to reasonably approach this from a technical perspective is to stick to the meta tag standards, which is what Discourse does.

@BCHK

Is there any easy way for me to have a better caption for Google Search results - for example the site description (or similar) from the “About Page”, for my discourse forum/News Plugin.

I understand that you think that it would be better to display the site description, but do you have any reason to think that showing the site description is better for SEO and user conversion than showing a list of recent topics?

In short, Google’s algorithm has decided that it’s better to show the latest topic list instead of the site’s meta description. Both are there in your markup and it’s made a decision in favor of the topic list. You think this is the wrong decision. Fair enough, but Discourse has provided all the relevant data. The rest is up to Google.

If you really wanted to lean into this approach, you could create a Discourse plugin which removes the structured topic list data that Discourse provides to search engines. This would make it much more likely that Google would show your site’s meta description. However, unless you had a really good reason to think this was better, I wouldn’t advise it.