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?
好的 - 一个相关的问题。
我只使用 Discourse 来搭建我的网站——它基本上是 WordPress 的替代品，带有一个论坛。
对于其中的一些页面（主题），我需要精心设计它们并针对 SEO 进行优化。
是否有办法在单个主题级别创建/编辑元描述。我有一些特定的帖子，我希望初始帖子针对 SEO 进行高度优化。完成后，我可能会锁定该帖子，也可能不锁定。
主题的元描述是OP（原始帖子）的开头几句话。例如，对于这个主题，它是：
<meta name="description" content="嘿，伙计们，
我们有一个小型社区，需要更改以下页面的元描述：
https://community.flowmapp.com/
https://community.flowmapp.com/c/news
https://community.flowmapp.com/categories
ht&hellip;">
目前没有办法手动更改主题的元标签。
如果能够做到这一点，那将是非常棒的——类似于我们目前能够为帖子添加可选标签的方式。
短期内——我希望有一种方法可以逐个主题地做到这一点，即使我需要进行一些原始的 HTML 编辑。
但我看到了更广泛的需求——在我的例子中，我只希望管理员或版主能够对单个帖子进行此元描述的添加/编辑。
它只需要成为创建新主题时菜单中的另一个选项（仅对有权访问它的人可见，例如管理员/版主）。就像这样：点击 Meta，它会打开另一个文本行，类似于标题文本框，就在类别/可选标签区域下方。
也许也有个人可能想要这样做的用例（但在我看来优先级非常低）。
由于 Discourse 主题主要是纯粹的UGC，这是一种比较小众的需求，IMO 最好通过自定义插件来处理。
插件可以允许管理员设置主题的 Meta 和 OpenGraph 标签，并将这些内容存储在主题自定义字段中。
所以——与此相关——有两个问题：
那么——现在每个页面的元描述是帖子的前几个词——确切的字数/字符数是多少？
如果我编辑/更改帖子的第一行，它是否会在我每次编辑/更改时更新元描述？
啊——刚测试了一下——它现在的工作方式很好——解决了我的问题。我可以调整帖子第一句话的措辞以获得最佳的 SEO，并且每次修改后都会更新。
谢谢！这方面一切都很好。
我将让您的生活变得更加轻松。如果您不是内容创作者，而是更偏向技术，那可能会让您的生活变得困难；）
元字段对于创建搜索结果摘要至关重要。但它们对于搜索结果排名来说并不那么重要。将前两句话写成这样，让人类读者大致了解可以期待什么，这确实是个不错的举措——但同样，这与搜索结果无关。嗯，如果描述——这里是第一句话——让人类更容易点击该结果，那可能有关。
SEO价值来自于整体内容。
我的意思是，您花费的所有时间浏览原始HTML和元设置并没有帮助提高SEO。但如果您将同样的时间用于创建有用的内容……嗯，那才是真正的战场；）
论坛就是一个很好的例子。主题的第一个帖子价值很小，除了它可能与某人搜索的内容相同。真正的价值来自于主题本身，而且没有元字段——但Google仍然对它们评价很高。
SEO业务……真是……。
