# בעיית SEO: שמות ה-slug עבור נושאים לעולם לא אמורים להשתנות בשינויי כותרת
**URL:** https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580
**Category:** Support
**Created:** [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 4:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580 "2020-08-31T16:43:17Z")
**Posts on this page:** 14
**Page:** 1
### Author:  [@Terrapop](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Terrapop)
#### Post date: [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 4:43pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/1 "2020-08-31T16:43:17Z")
Another issue I detected today. This one is a particularly bad practice with regards to SEO and social media.
The slug name of a topic changes once the title changes.
That’s a big SEO no, no.
Imagine, you have a topic that has gained a lot of backlinks or is going viral on social media.
Now a TL3 user finds a typo in the title and changes the title.
The slug changes too and therefore the canonical URL.
All backlinks will be lost, and the topic will immediately stop going viral, as the former URL is now 404.
**Slug names should freeze once a topic has been posted.**
Only admins/mods should have the possibility to change the topic slugs and a warning should be given. Means, when I change the title as an admin/mod, options should be provided: only change the title, or change title and slug.
Update: I just found out that Discourse automatically 301 instead of 404 on slug changes. This mitigates the problem to some extend. Still would opt for a frozen slug.
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### Author:  [@fzngagan](https://meta.discourse.org/u/fzngagan)
#### Post date: [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 5:04pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/2 "2020-08-31T17:04:29Z")
I think the old link still points towards the actual topic, no?
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### Author:  [@Terrapop](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Terrapop)
#### Post date: [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 5:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/3 "2020-08-31T17:17:17Z")
Yes, it 301 redirects, but again I would opt for frozen slugs. Google “may” be fine with it. But if a TL3 user goes on a frenzy… I don’t know. I as an operator of the website would not like it.
For most social media sites, URL changes will mean you lose your engagement metrics for that URL, 301 don’t help here, more complicated approaches are needed in this case:
[https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/getting-started/versioned-link/](https://developers.facebook.com/docs/sharing/webmasters/getting-started/versioned-link/)
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### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 5:17pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/4 "2020-08-31T17:17:24Z")
It does, it redirects.
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### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [31 באוגוסט, 2020, 5:19pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/5 "2020-08-31T17:19:36Z")
This isn’t an SEO no-no. You’re presenting an incredibly contrived set of circumstances. If you’re worried that TL3 users will do this, make TL3 unobtainable on your particular instance.
This also isn’t a bug, the redirect and slug updates aren’t a fluke, it was engineered to behave this way.
> A bug report means something is broken, preventing normal/typical use of Discourse.
Which clearly isn’t true for the above.
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### Author:  [@santiyounger](https://meta.discourse.org/u/santiyounger)
#### Post date: [17 במרץ, 2022, 4:46pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/7 "2022-03-17T16:46:49Z")
I agree with the value of having a setting that allows us (as admins) to create frozen slugs.
@Stephen’s solution was to disable the ability to let some users update their titles. But I find that letting the users improve their titles is a good idea.
Even as an admin, I reorganize info and retitle things all the time, so I don’t think “not renaming titles” is a good solution.
* * *
## Alternative ideas
as an admin it would be incredible to be able to determine a slug for a posts. That way even if the title of the topic changes, the slug remains short and simple.
This would of course be an addition to the current 301 redirect, since after experimenting with it I realized it does work as long as the /[#number] at the end of the URL is kept.
* * *
I second @Terrapop’s request, I think it’s a great option to give to admins and avoid problems long-term
Thanks!
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### Author:  [@Stephen](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Stephen)
#### Post date: [17 במרץ, 2022, 8:05pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/8 "2022-03-17T20:05:15Z")
It’s unfair to characterize my comment as a solution - as the reply responded to in an edit it’s not really a problem. The redirect renders changes to the slug effectively meaningless.
Freezing slugs assumes the original title and resultant human-readable portion of the URL is in some way superior to the renamed version. If that’s really the case why would you want your users to be able to rename topics at all? That was my contention.
Assuming for a moment that topic renames _are_ beneficial, why wouldn’t you want the human readable URL to receive the same enhancement?
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### Author:  [@justin](https://meta.discourse.org/u/justin)
#### Post date: [17 במרץ, 2022, 10:01pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/9 "2022-03-17T22:01:18Z")
In a lot of regards, renaming a topic and the URL changing isn’t a major issue because it redirects properly. Topic routing is based on topic id, so even if you type in `https://meta.discourse.org/t/donk/162580`, you still get to this topic. That topic id will not change from any user interaction on the site.
If the URL 404’ed, sure, SEO and social would be a problem, but it doesn’t – it redirects and Google will properly update the URL.
We do recommend all community managers update titles to accurately reflect the contents of the discussion. This is good for both SEO (as the biggest factor in ranking is matching search intent with page contents) and discovery/participation within the community itself.
For more on how we think about SEO:
> **[Handling SEO for Discourse Communities](https://blog.discourse.org/2021/11/discourse-forum-seo/)**
>
> If you are concerned about how your community is performing in search engine results (SEO), there are a number of questions to keep in mind when looking to optimize your community software of choice. We frequently get asked questions in our support...
> **[8 Tips to Improve Your Community’s SEO](https://blog.discourse.org/2021/10/forum-seo/)**
>
> Helping people find your community takes time and patience. It also takes a little knowledge about search engines, how they work, and how people locate your community through them. In this article, we’re going to demystify the basics of SEO and how...
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### Author:  [@Jagster](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Jagster)
#### Post date: [18 במרץ, 2022, 6:33pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/10 "2022-03-18T18:33:14Z")
> [@Stephen](#):
>
> why wouldn’t you want the human readable URL to receive the same enhancement?
Because URLs aren’t showing so often nowadays? And because Discourse is not using nice URLs at all (as it can be done like in WordPress)?
Human readable URL was somekind SEO-hype earlier and sure it helped a user understand what can be expected, but today most platforms are using similar approach as Onebox here is. URLs are not important for a user any more.
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### Author:  [@Discoursenaut](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discoursenaut)
#### Post date: [23 בדצמבר, 2022, 4:39am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/11 "2022-12-23T04:39:40Z")
How does renaming titles redirect automatically? Is that a setting that has to be configured manually? Currently renaming posts seems to break links.
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### Author:  [@RGJ](https://meta.discourse.org/u/RGJ)
#### Post date: [23 בדצמבר, 2022, 6:48am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/12 "2022-12-23T06:48:52Z")
I am unable to reproduce that on latest tests-passed. Please describe a way to reproduce this step by step.
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### Author:  [@Discoursenaut](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discoursenaut)
#### Post date: [23 בדצמבר, 2022, 11:46am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/13 "2022-12-23T11:46:59Z")
Just performed a series of tests and this seems to work as expected now, perhaps it was just an error on my end at the time, or perhaps I was removing the series of digits at the end of the post.
Is there a limit to the number of topic title changes that are stored, or any topic change gets redirected?
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### Author:  [@Falco](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Falco)
#### Post date: [23 בדצמבר, 2022, 5:26pm UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/14 "2022-12-23T17:26:03Z")
> [@Discoursenaut](#):
>
> Is there a limit to the number of topic title changes that are stored, or any topic change gets redirected?
There is not a store, not even a redirect creation. The name of the topic is completely dismissed when the URL has the topic ID, so renames are free.
For example, this topic here is
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580)
but if I change the URL to
[https://meta.discourse.org/t/i-like-pineaple-pizza/162580](https://meta.discourse.org/t/i-like-pineaple-pizza/162580)
it works just the same.
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### Author:  [@Discoursenaut](https://meta.discourse.org/u/Discoursenaut)
#### Post date: [24 בדצמבר, 2022, 11:18am UTC](https://meta.discourse.org/t/seo-issue-slug-names-for-topics-should-never-change-on-title-changes/162580/15 "2022-12-24T11:18:52Z")
Ah, I understand now, thank you very much for the clarification @Falco 🙌