Can't fix Media pages duplicate titles?

dutchbb

Well-known member
Affected version
1.5
I have a notice of duplicate title with the media pages in webmaster tools. Not something to worry about but i noticed that when using '?page=' for pagination that google thinks this is a duplicate.

I have read that google drops everything after ? (or gives problems) with googlebot so that could be the problem. I also had an add-on before that gave the option to jump to a page which gave the same problem because it used '?page=' (xf2 does this also). Before i thought this was because of duplicate with 'page-', but doesn't seem the case.

https://www.hallaminternet.com/avoiding-the-seo-pitfalls-of-url-parameters/ (query strings)

Normally with query strings in titles you have it pointing to the correct url without it (canonical). So that is no problem, but in this case it point to an url with query string. So maybe google in confused by things like that.

Difference forum thread categories and media:
Code:
<link rel="prev" href="fora/supplementen.22/" /><link rel="next" href="fora/supplementen.22/page-3" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://forum.bodybuilding.nl/fora/supplementen.22/page-2" />

<link rel="prev" href="media/?page=5" /><link rel="next" href="media/?page=7" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://forum.bodybuilding.nl/media/?page=6" />

With xf2 this has been done the same as thread categorie pages:
https://xenforo.com/community/media/page-3

But like i said nothing to be worried about because forums have a lot of duplicate titles and google will filter these. I even have many threads indexed with good ranking of same title and categorie pages are especially not so important. But interesting to know how google handles ? in pagination.

In this post i had notices with different query strings in titles because of the jump to page add-on that used '?page=' and they are gone know when i removed the add-on.
https://xenforo.com/community/threa...tags-but-not-thread-pages.130799/post-1172793

Same problem was with media pages filtering and that is also gone now. But the '?page=' is something new in webmaster tools. Could be that google will correct this after some time.
https://xenforo.com/community/threa...-sorting-of-threads-indexed-in-google.134788/

Similar threads about this:
https://xenforo.com/community/threa...icate-title-tags-but-not-thread-pages.130799/ (pagination, same for resource pages)
https://xenforo.com/community/threads/google-indexing-gallery-content-with-2-different-urls.89967/ (query string related)

Either way rel=canonical is the best way to handle these and are used correctly on xenforo. Google also filters them if not used or in cases like this. So not really a bug but something to look after.
https://support.google.com/webmaste...&visit_id=1-636504194493164834-339049908&rd=1
 
Last edited:
The reason we don't use the /page-2 style pagination in XFMG 1.x is because there were limitations with the routing system in XF1 which are not present in XF2.

As such, we can consider this mostly resolved, but would require updating to XFMG 2.
 
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