Not A duplicate Content Question - Honest - So please dont ignore

Hi Guys this isnt another duplicate content question honest.


Ok I lied it is but please don't desert me.

I asked this question a couple of weeks ago but no answer came back, Im still in need of some info really so if you could oblige it would be helpful.

My forum urlrewriter seems to create an url for each seperate page of a topic

for example

page 1 www.mysite.co.uk/forum/sametopicname/0

page 2 www.mysite.co.uk/forum/sametopicname/10/

page 3 www.mysite.co.uk/form/sametopicname/20/


Now obviously all have different content, but as the page title is created by using the topic title all are going to use the same meta title name.

My conclusion is this will put all the pages from topics with more than 1 page into supplemental results for not using unique meta titles.

Am I right or wrong ? Please advise as I need to get back to the forum modification developer.

Many thanks - Glenn

Please someone ?

This is what the modification developer says

"I don't think having the same titles is enough to put a page in supplemental results, it needs to have substantially the same content."

If I could choose I'd have unique titles on each and every page, regardless of supplemental results its going to help your click through rate if you can edit the title (and description) of each page so its relevant to the page content when a SE displays it in results listings.

Are you paying this developer or is it a free mod and you are trying to pursuade him to do it?

Well first of all, you're certainly not doing yourself any favors by having pages with the exact same titles - if there is different content then you should have different titles to capitalize on more long-tail traffic. Your developer might be right, he might also be wrong.

There was a site that I took over about a year ago that had several (probably near 100) pages with the same title. "URL Name." While most were in supplemental, there were plenty that weren't and in some cases, simply changing the title was enough to get some of them out, but not all of them.

Leaving it how your developer suggests could cause you some problems with supplemental, but you could easily conquer that with a deep link or two.

Your bigger concern should be just the general ability to make the title whatever you want.

All of that is said, however, from a general website view. Because we're talking about a forum here, it's a bit different. Even then I wouldn't use the "exact same" title. Usually when you're taling about forum posts or long articles that are continued on 2 or 3 pages the titles are something like this:

"Mytitle"
"Page 2 - Mytitle"
"Page 3 - Mytitle"

That's widely accepted and certainly won't cause any supplemental problems (which isn't to say that the pages won't go supplemental, it just won't be because of duplicate titles).

Hope this helps

Thanks for replying guys. The forum mod guy does it for free but I am trying to persuade him it is a bad idea to have pages with the same title.

Yesterday these 3 pages were in the main index :

www.site/forum/north-east-coast-fishing/a-secret-location-somewhere-near-to-brid/0/

www.site/forum/north-east-coast-fishing/a-secret-location-somewhere-near-to-brid/10/

www.site/forum/north-east-coast-fishing/a-secret-location-somewhere-near-to-brid/20/

Today the 10 and 20 version has dissapeared and the 0 version has gone supplemantal

There are only two issues here-

page content

tilte and meta tags.

if your page content is all differnet but your title is the same change your title and i cant see any reson why this wont clear up, as long as you dont have more then one url with differnet sturtures indexing the same page it has to be the title.

personally what your web designer says sounds right to a degree. you do need a lot of the content to be the same to be classed as duplicate content, but as your title is a major on page factor they should be differnet.

Do some testing just try it on 3 threads (if this is possible) for X amount of time if they get indexed you know it's down to your title - personally it'll be the titles.

Cant he set it up so anything after page 1 doesn't get spidered. This would solve the problem.

He seems pretty unwilling to chop out any page after the first and he wont right anything to allow us to manually change the title as he says this isnt what his mod is about. I have had my reservations about this forum modification since I installed it as I feel (with no evidence I must admit) that it has been a hinderance to seo rather than a benefit. Out of 2000 + pages I currently have 5 in the main index. The only thing stopping me ditching it is because I have set up quite a few links into the forum pages and they will be lost.

Hi
To be honest those links are going to do you very little if you have over 2000 pages not indexed. You have to bare in mind that in that mass of pages could be keywords etc.. that would get you traffic maybe even quiet a lot.

I would have personally said that if the page content was different then it wouldn't be put into dup. content have you got all your domains redirecting into 1 as in

example.com

or

www.example.com as this could cause a dup. content issue.

If you have then it is the title as there is nothing else it can be.

To be honest I think this is a lesson learnt situation. Check the domain names first.