This is a good question @revote !

For our community, we have the meta description in place in the phrases tool but not in the SEO&SOCIAL. 

However the descriptions are in place both on Google and social media. 

We have both meta descriptions, but with (totally) different texts

Which one is showing (and where)? 

Actually, there are 3 different metatags in the Phrases:

I tested and they are displayed like this:

Google

Top row: Key: community name AND Key: Ask your question

Second row: Text from Branding → SEO & SOCIAL

This second row text is same than our Key: On the {forum} you can ask for help or participate in discussions.

Social media

Key: community.name

Hmm.

Well this is odd, I googled your community and for me the meta description is entirely missing and it comes from one of the topics.

I found another topic about this but it seems to come to another conclusion 

Yeah, true. Meta description can´t be found from the first view, when viewing the search results. It can be found from the link “More results from...”.

I Googled your community and it seems that you have same behaviour.

Thanks, that was good link.

Yeah, compared with this:

Our 1 & 2 are the other way around. Your community is just like above. Hmm. Weird.

Edit: I create a ticket and ask why meta description isnt visible in the first view, and why our 1 & 2 are other way around.

I tested more, I searched Gainsight community. Their meta description can be seen in the first view and they have 1 & 2 just like we have.

This is weird, we haven't changed anything and now our community’s meta description is as it should - it can be seen from the first view.

Well this is odd, again. 

I googled your community and for me the meta description is again entirely missing and it comes from one of the topics 

I tested with desktop and it was ok.

After your comment I tested with my mobile and I can see same than you - MD is missing.

As said, I asked this missing MD and the order of the phrases from Support. They forwarded my case to the engineers and I felt their response that I should not ask this kind of questions. And that they dont know why this have happened, maybe there is delay or something.

Because MD was displayed ok, when I tested again, ticket is now closed.

This is all I know at the moment.

​@revote “FUN!”

Well, I dont know about that

I’ve been following closely on all things related to SEO here on Gainsight community (and formerly InSpired). Not much seems to be happening.

But here’s a few topics around this:

The description of how meta titles and meta descriptions work (MDs are “automatically populated” btw)
 

Here’s an idea by ​@timcavey about this:

And here’s an idea by me:
 

I understand, kinda, that MD is populated automatically for topics. But why for the community itself also?

I mean, I can see again that when searching our community name from Google, we dont have community MD in place. There is MD form random topic? Why MD is in place sometimes, and sometimes not?

What comes to ideas you shared, we used Khoros platform before this Gainsight. When you create new article, you can define SEO title and Meta Description for it. Each and every article individually, if you like. And of course you want.

Khoros doesnt have editable MD for topics either, it is populated automatically there as well. Communities have so many topics, I dont want to edit MD´s to each and every topic but sure, I see the benefit if I can edit MD to some of them.

For some reason these SEO related ideas doesn’t get votes here...

Yeah, the meta descriptions seem to randomly change also for categories and ideation. 

I wonder, is this because of Gainsight platform or Google

Also, does this effect to our SEO? This is not my comfort zone but I think it might cause problems.

I hoped that Gainsight team joined to this topic?

• Why community´s meta description is some day from random topic, and later on MD is same what is set to platform settings? And later it is again from random topic (comment above)
• Does this cause problems to SEO?
• Why there are two different places where define SEO? From Control and frontend from Admin panel? (Question in the opening post)
• Why places of the phrases vary between different communities? (comment above)

This is getting ridiculous, when searching our community from Bing, Meta Description is in place and ok but our favicon is replaced with random members profile picture.

If I would not cry, I would laugh for this.

I agree, I see the same for your community on Bing. This is very random 

Is it possible to have comments from the team now, ​@revathimenon / ​@Kenneth R or someone else? I have keep waiting...

Hi ​@revote and ​@Suvi Lehtovaara - apologies, am diving into this one (off the top of my head I’m not clear on how this works either).

Ok, so to touch on and confirm a few things:

The way to set meta descriptions is indeed to use the dedicated fields (rather than the phrases, as those are legacy).

Meta descriptions can be set for the homepage and for categories, but indeed not for topics, similar to other platforms.  Google will create the meta description based on the page content.

And here’s the interesting part, from my research just now it appears that it’s quite normal and expected for Google to over-write the meta-description that is defined for the page very often (I saw one reference for it being as much as 70% of the time).  Google will do that if it feels that the given description doesn’t match the content of the page well enough.  We can reduce the likelihood of Google doing that by optimising the description (relevant, not too long, etc..).

Yeah I understand if there is something problem with the MD (relevancy, too long etc what you said) but we havent updated it lately. We made small changes few months back. I think our MD should be good, you can always optimise everything, of course, but if I compare our MD to ​@Suvi Lehtovaara´s, there is nothing to fix from relevancy perspective though. I will shorten it a bit, let´s see whats happens.

So we can delete phrases?

​@revote Yep!  I just tested in sandbox to be sure.  You can delete the phrase - whatever you put into Branding > SEO & Social is what is getting loaded.