hello, I have started a local forum. In webmaster tools, i have found a warning that my forum has duplicate title tags. will it create any bad effect on seo? please take a look from my forum http://forums.jahirol.com then please suggest me.
Title Tag is important because when Crawl is crawling make sure your tag is relevant and second time in not use and may be so any other local related details add.. like a city name etc..
You should change it... For my forum I used Topic Title for a Page title! And also, if you don't open a topic, but just the category (use the category title...). That way you will boost your rankings, because you do one of the important steps in On-Page SEO -> Unique title for every page!
In your forum, if created topics which is already exist then you should restrict the users and guide your forum users before search if the topic is available, if not available then it is appropriate to create topic so that your forum would have unique content.
Thanks @SASA Techno @patco, do u use mybb? How did u changed this? @SERPpoint, I was talking about topic replies. When users post a new reply, by default it's heading becomes: "Re: then the original title"
It won't hurt you, it just WON'T HELP. The duplicate content feature is there for a reason, so fix it.
Hello, Duplicate Titles and Descriptions do not cause penalties. They can cause problems in ranking when one of the pages gets ranked and the other one filtered out of that search result. Google may well not choose the page you prefer to rank for that particular query. Google is all about original content and anything you can do to make the content fresh and different will help Google, you and your visitors. Have a nice day
It won't hurt you but it does mean you are not ensuring that G picks up the exact title tag you want it to. There is some debate about which one it will actually choose - most I think feel it will choose the first one it finds - but unless you are absolutely equally happy with all the duplicates, you will want to control which one G uses by eliminating the others. Excellent question by the way - comes up often.