Forum Discussion

iftomkins's avatar
iftomkins
Maven
10 years ago

Do we need this SEO setting?: "Append topic ID to title and description meta tags"

Greetings Lithosphere! We have the following SEO setting checked by default: "append topic ID to title and description meta tags". It appends a string of numbers to the topic title, which means that in Google Results, there is a number in every title. We'd prefer to remove the number, as it's not aesthetically pleasing.

 

 

I understand the underlying SEO reason for this of avoiding duplicate content. However, none of our posts should have the exact same content. If they do, someone has cross-posted and our moderators should address it.

 

Can we safely turn off this setting and stop appending the numbers, without hurting SEO? Any other considerations?

 

Cheers,

Alan

 

4 Replies

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  • mwanlin's avatar
    mwanlin
    Maven
    10 years ago

    Yeah, definitely interested in what utilitarian benefit this provides, beyond the distinguishing aesthetic when seeing similar threads next to one another.

  • CarolineS's avatar
    CarolineS
    Boss
    2 months ago

    I have the same question! We don't have this checked and I'm curious if we should. I know it has been almost 10 years since this question was posted...

  • Claudius's avatar
    Claudius
    Boss
    31 days ago

    I don't see how enabling this would help SEO in any way in 2025. The only very special case where it could be minorly helpful would be if you had many topics that share the same title. But even in that scenario the canonical base URL would already be different. So I'd file this setting under "legacy setting that should be removed from admin"