Phrase Forum metatags vs. Branding / SEO & Social?

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.

Thanks. I trust you and I deleted those 3 phrases related with the Meta Description.

Also I updated our MD a bit, to Branding > SEO & Social menu. Now it is 148 characters long.

Let´s see what happens. Thanks.