Bad for SEO?
| foxhound |
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In the forums you can link to a topic and you can also link to a single post in that topic.
The problem is, google sees both links as seperate pages but both have the same title, so in the end you end up with dozens/hundreds/thoussands of duplicate title tags reported by google webmaster tools. For example, this topic on my website has the following title: http://www.armaholic.com/forums.php?m=posts&q=12527 - title= Armaholic - FORUMS - Arma2 (not responding.) But, if you click the link of the first post (so only the first post shows which google sees as a seperate page) you have the following link with the same title: http://www.armaholic.com/forums.php?m=posts&id=94497 - title= Armaholic - FORUMS - Arma2 (not responding.) Now, I have been wondering about those duplicate titles for many months now and today I found this post: http://www.cranked.me/2008/11/duplicate-title-tags-meta-descriptions.html In this article they use if/else statements to prevent a search engine from seeing the link as a seperate page. But to be honest I dont have the slightest idea how to translate this into our cotonti system. I checked these Cototnit forums and noticed the title has been removed completely for topics. Is that due to the above mentioned to prevent duplicate titles in your website? Google webmaster tools is reporting the same issues when you sort list by letters and some other places. I searched this site wether or not this was discussed before but couldn't find anything. Anyone has a suggestion for me how to prevent this or how to implement a code so search engines skip the anchor link? [edit] I am worried this influnces the ranking of my forums on google, or any other punishment they might hand out. It is like this for a long time already, I thought it was time for me to try and get this fixed. Added 2 days later: Nobody has any idea? Is this cause no one else who uses cotonti has this problem? If so........you could tell me what you did to prevent it. Or maybe nobody cares about duplicate pages/titles? <img src="http://www.armaholic.com/datas/thumbs/green-sea-battalion-uniforms-version-03-preview_4.jpg" alt="green-sea-battalion-uniforms-version-03-" />
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| Отредактировано: foxhound (10.12.2010 16:23, 14 лет назад) |
| GHengeveld |
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I don't think there's ever been a discussion about this before. I see the problem you're having and you're right that we should do something about it. First we need to clarify the problem though.
The problem lies not with the URLs. The content of the different URLs is different. For example the forums URL with q=1234 references a forum topic, while the id=1234 references a single post. The page listing URLs for filters/sorting is a somewhat special case. The content is duplicate, but the order is different. In my opinion this counts as duplicate, so it shouldn't be indexed by Google. The solution is to not let Google index the duplicate pages. This can be achieved in a couple of ways. I think the easiest is to use rel="nofollow" on the URLs that shouldn't be indexed (such as filters/sorting URLs). Another solution is to use JavaScript for filtering and sorting content, but of course you should consider the chance that people don't have JavaScript enabled. Another solution could be to use robots.txt but that's something I haven't really looked in to. This article may be interesting (it outlines the problem foxhound is describing). |
| foxhound |
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Very usefull article, thanks for posting the link Koradhil.
I am using the "nofollow" on other parts of the site, I never figured/thought I could use it for this as well to prevent the multiple title problem. Thank you for pointing that out to me  I am going to add that to my tpl and see if that fixes the title issue. If so I can apply it any other places causing the same issue. <img src="http://www.armaholic.com/datas/thumbs/green-sea-battalion-uniforms-version-03-preview_4.jpg" alt="green-sea-battalion-uniforms-version-03-" />
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