I dont think Forums need to worry abt duplicate content Google knows White from black

I dont think Forums need to worry about duplicate conent. Google knows White from black.

Is anyone with me on this?

Someone please explain to me why i would need to make an edit on a forum to remove duplicate content.

Im not understanding why people want to edit their forums. Google is not stupid.

-C

 

Im a little confused about it....

i think that the one with 1 page and ten links will def. have more authority /weight to google than one with 10 pages (1 link per page)

this is where im confused:

How often will a forum have a DUPLICATE forum title, (thats what your talkin about when you say duplicate content (you mean the duplicate thread titles/posts - right)

I could also see that there are 10 other forums with the title i.e. - "Whats the best inline/intext ad program" (something like that) and - Digitalpoint wins because of the higher page rank.

As far as other forums go, there will always be duplicate threads competing against each other and whoever has higher page rank will win.


If the duplicate content is within your own forum and its not your "forum threads/posts" Im not really sure how often will you have duplicate content on your own forum posts/ threads? do you get a lot of this?

Im i way off? Not sure if im understanding this?

-C

 

Wow,

Why are so many differnt urls generated, thats crazy!? I see exactly what your saying now and it makes perfect sense. I would have thought Vbulletin would have created the forums so that the "extra urls" were not created and only one single page was. It makes more extra work...Now all webmasters need to either fix it manually or buy a plugin.

Thank you very much for clarifying shawn...(will give DP another shout out on my Twitter account)

-C

 

That would be great..

Im not really a programmer, my partner is. I'm sure members would love your Free plugins. I like to say "if it aint broke, dont fix it" ... So if its working for you it will most likely work for other forum owners.

Being good to your loyal forum members can only help you in the long run also.

I think the "take it or leave it policy" would be great and is more than generous. Maybe you can put a paypal donate buton. I would definitely donate.

Thank you Shawn


-C

 

This is the type of thing I have fixed on my own forum running MyBB. Using canonical and nofollow to ensure that a page is indexed only one time. I even added a "Page X" to the titles which imho helped further.

Example results:
Counter Strike Hack Downloads - Page 1
Counter Strike Hack Downloads - Page 2

You can use Google Webmaster Tools to also help you narrow down problems with duplicate content. It actually tells you what duplicate Meta Description Tags you have.

You do want to avoid dup content at all costs.

 

Where would you go and edit it down to one ( i shouldve asked in my last post)

I need to take care of this soon.

Thanks again Shawn and Rec.

-C

 

Depends on what forum software you use. Normally edits are going to be html based where you make sure nofollow and canonical are used properly.

 

That's where canonical comes into play. Even if externally linked you can make sure the correct URL works. Not sure about VB but with MYBB it's not a problem. VB allows for individual post views which imho is duplicate content. MyBB doesn't do that.

That's why you use nofollow and canonical TOGETHER. Google won't follow it and if by chance of link it does find the page it won't index it.

Then of course there is the obvious robots.txt.

Lastly there is making sure that all bots view your site in a specific way. However I don't want to give details as some may view this as cloaking. But as an example I might allow guests to view member signatures but not bots.

You're obviously a VB pro Shawn so people should listen to you but imho...I got MyBB down pat. Pretty sure no one does MyBB SEO better than me.