We have seen this problematic pattern in the past with some other sites.
In many ways, Google is a black box and it behaves in mysterious ways. That said, there is some general guidance that I think is important to follow:
Establish authority for your domain
Google is built on PageRank. The more inbound links your forum has, the better the PageRank.
When I search for keycloak.discourse.group, the top link is on meta (this topic), but number #2 is:
The #2 authoritative answer Google has is “don’t use keycloak.discourse.group”
Additionally, there is no “authority” of where discussion should live:
- GitHub is fine
- Slack is fine
- Mailing is fine
- Discourse is fine
Instead, centralize on one platform for async discussion. You now have 3 options for a pretty small (in the big scheme) amount of discussion.
Mailing list is getting 20-30 posts a month.
Discourse is getting a bit more
GitHub is getting similar traffic to Discourse
Pick a winner and run with it; this is how you establish authority
Bias toward capitalizing on your existing authority
When it comes to choosing a domain, you already have authority on your existing https://www.keycloak.org/ brand.
When designing a community, your preference should be to grow your online brand.
community.keycloak.org or forum.keycloak.org is what you want. Not Reddit, GitHub, or even discourse.group.
Additionally, have a footer and link to this forum / async community portal from every page.