Posts in WP Discourse interferes with the SEO of the Wordpress site

Product Support WordPress

AI-generated summary

Mikhail_Tyuftyaev raised a concern that posts imported from WordPress to Discourse under the “News” category are being indexed by search engines, potentially affecting SEO. He considered blocking the category via robots.txt but noted the URL structure doesn’t reflect the category name (e.g., posts appear as /t/... instead of /news/...). He asked for help either adjusting the URL structure or hiding posts from indexing. Jagster reassured him that this is not an SEO issue, explaining that Discourse uses canonical URLs to point back to the original WordPress post, which preserves SEO value — and may even enhance it if users engage with the posts on Discourse. Mikhail_Tyuftyaev thanked Jagster for clarifying the role of canonical links, expressing relief that Discourse handles this automatically.

1

Hello everyone.
I ran into a problem.
When my posts from a Wordpress blog are imported to Discourse, they are visible to search robots.

My posts are imported into the “News” category

I was thinking about adding the “News” category to the file robots.txt, but the category url does not spell out the word “News”
For example:
URL category “News”: https://example.com/c/news/5
URL post in category "News: https://example.com/t/conditional-formatting/244
I’m thinking to add a category to robots.txt, but the URL should look like this: https://example.com/news/conditional-formatting/244
Please tell me how I can do this?

Perhaps there are other options to hide posts from WP Discourse from indexing. Any ideas?
Please help to solve this problem

2

There is nothing to solve out. It is not affecting your SEO anyway because of canonical URLs. It is actually someway improving your SEO (if users are commenting or reacting, and if Google thinks so).

3

@Jagster Thank you very much for your reply.
I didn’t even know what canonical links were. It’s good that Discourse can do this