Hey guys,
We have our small community and we have the need to change meta descriptions for next pages:
https://community.flowmapp.com/https://community.flowmapp.com/c/newshttps://community.flowmapp.com/categorieshttps://community.flowmapp.com/privacyI also found the Topic from 2019 and I can assume that it’s might be impossible to do.
Maybe some updates released since then?
Appreciate any help.
Thanks.
Well you can change the homepage description via a site setting, which you can see here on meta if you view source
<meta name="description" content="Discussion about the next-generation open source Discourse forum software">
As for the category homepage /c/category-name, as you can see on the support category here on meta, the description is generated from the “about this category” topic for each category:
<meta name="description" content="Support on configuring and using Discourse after it is up and running. For installation questions, use the install category.">
The /category directory page inherits the same description as the homepage which seems correct to me
<meta name="description" content="Support on configuring and using Discourse after it is up and running. For installation questions, use the install category.">
The /privacy page indeed has no meta description tag, so I suppose we could add something generic like
<meta name="description" content="privacy policy for {sitename}">
but is it really worth it? I mean how many people are gonna Google for the privacy policy for a site, plus, the <title> tag is good
<title>Privacy policy | Discourse - Civilized Discussion</title>
and the primary <h1> header tag is also good
<h1 id="privacy-questions-and-answers">Privacy Questions and Answers</h1>
So I’m not sure there’s really anything necessary to do here.
The thing is, as per Google’s guidelines, we’re fixing some problems here and there. Lack of Meta Descriptions and copies are considered as a site errors and can highly affect an overall rating in search results.
Besides that - I agree it’s not worth it and we would never start doing this if not Google Policies.
Could you please clarify more on how exactly can we change these settings? I couldn’t find these options from our Admin dashboard and I probably just misunderstood you.
Thank you!
To edit category descriptions, enter the category, press the edit button at upper right
then look for the Edit Description button on the first tab of category preferences
As for the site description, re-run the setup wizard, it’s one of the steps. Or look for site description in your site settings.
Thank you very much Mr. Codinghorror!
Appreciate your help a lot and it’s always relieving to see in the thread your avatar from Steve McConnell’s book (yeah, I read your blog) - for me, this image strongly associates with the feeling of “ok, now I’m in capable hands and Jeff will help”
Take care!
Hey there!
I am back with the same problem but on the next level. Thanks, @codinghorror, for showing how to edit the description of a category. We could do this, however, we could not change the meta description of a category. Every time, we run an SEO audit of the site, we get an error that the main community page, privacy policy page, ToS page, and category page have duplicated meta descriptions. So I am looking for ways to edit the meta description of privacy policy page, ToS page on our discourse account. Do you know of a way to do it?
OK - a related question.
I’m using only Discourse for my website - so its basically a Wordpress replacement with a forum.
For some of the pages (Topics), I need to carefully design them and optimize them for SEO.
Is there a way to create / edit meta descriptions at the individual topic level. I have specific threads where I’d like the initial post to be highly optimized for SEO. And I may or may not lock the thread after its done.
Meta description of a topic is the first words of the OP. For example for this topic here it is
<meta name="description" content="Hey guys,
We have our small community and we have the need to change meta descriptions for next pages:
https://community.flowmapp.com/
https://community.flowmapp.com/c/news
https://community.flowmapp.com/categories
ht&hellip;">
There is no way to manually change a topic Meta tags at the moment.
It would be really nice to be able to do this - similar to how we are currently able to add optional tags to a post.
In the short term - I’d love a hack that would allow me to do this on a topic by topic basis, even if I need to do some raw HTML editing.
But I see a broader need for this too - In my case I’d only want the Admin or perhaps moderators to do this addition / editing of meta description to individual posts.
All it would need to be is another option in the menu when a new topic is created (visible only to people who would have access to it - e.g. admins / moderators). Like this: Click on Meta and it would open another text line similar to the title text box, just below category/optional tags area.
Perhaps there is also a use case where individuals might want to do this (but it seems to me a very low priority.)
As Discourse topics are mainly pure UGC, this is kinda of a more niche need, which would be better handled by a custom plugin IMO.
Plugin could allow staff to set a topic Meta and OpenGraph tags and store such content in Topic Custom Fields.
So - related to this - two questions:
So - the meta description right now for each page are the first words of the post - how many words / characters exactly?
If I edit / change the first line of the post, does it update the meta description each time I edit / change it?
Ah - just tested this out - and the way it works right now is fine - solves my perceived problem. I can tweak the words on the first sentence of the post to get the best SEO, and it updates after each modification.
Thanks! All is good on this front.
I’ll make your life even easier. Or difficult if you aren’t a content creator but more techincally oriented 
Meta-felds are needed to create snippets for search results. But those are quite unrelevant for search result ranking. It is really nice move to make first two sentences such way it gives an idea for human reader what one can expect — but again, it has nothing to do with with search results. Well, it may have if a description — here the very first sentence — makes clicking that result easier for human.
SEO value comes fron content as whole.
I’m meaning that all that time you have browsed thru raw html and meta settings didn’t help get better SEO. But if you would spend that same time to create useful content… well, that is the real play field
Forums are good example of that. First post of a topic has very little value, other than it can be same as someone will search. The real value comes from topic itself and there is no meta-fields — and still Google values those quite high.
SEO business is… something.
