Duplicate Titles - Anyone?

[TheBigK]

I've been performing a cleanup of our website and the Google Webmaster Tools reports that our site has ~ 1000 duplicate titles. I performed a check and it looks like there are several threads with titles like -

"Hello Everyone"
"I'm New"

Until now, I never paid attention to such errors; but I think it's better if I fix those. Given the number it's going to take a LOT of time and efforts to clean up the stuff.

I'm wondering if anyone's facing such problems. Should I just ignore these errors?

 

[ENF]

I think in this case, it's really up to how much you want to micromanage the titles people choose for threads.

My personal feeling is that those pages are not critical, at least those types you mentioned above. Critical or core content, we watch very carefully since that's our bread and butter. Introduction or help threads are just white noise and I don't think there is so much impact on the overall importance.

Lastly, I don't think GWT notes these as 'errors', if you're talking about the HTML Improvements / Duplicate Title Tags. That's more of an FYI and you can fix it if you would like to. They do 'suggest' fixing it, but again it's not critical unless your core content is "Hello Everyone" threads.

 

[TheBigK]

Our core content, of course isn't "Hello Everyone". It's just that I'm trying everything possible to recover from the traffic drop. Just making sure we've nothing Google'd point at as a 'cause of traffic drop'

 

[Jake Bunce]

Different threads with the same titles? Why is that a problem? They are still separate pages. The URLs will be different.

 

[TheBigK]

Different threads with the same titles? Why is that a problem? They are still separate pages. The URLs will be different.

Well, Google Webmaster Tools reports these titles are duplicates. In fact, for several threds have similar meta description like. So to Google it looks like -

"Hello Everyone"

First post looks like this -

"Hello everyone! I'm glad to join this community and look forward to having a great time here".

So, they're just copying each other's introduction which results into Google thinking that they're duplicate. It's strange, but at least Google's reporting like that.

 

[Luxus]

Introduction threads are not really interesting for guests imo. At least I never paid attention to any introduction forums as a guest. Perhaps you want to restrict access to your introduction forum for guests and thus, google.