Merging duplicate page title threads. Good or bad idea?

[Anatoliy]

Yeah, it's again about SEO. )

So I have a lot of old threads, that have duplicate page titles. I'm thinking this way: if I merge 2 threads (leaving redirection) with the same title, especially if each of them don't have more than 10 replies, I will get one good "full page" instead of 2 "half pages" with little text.

I'm planning to write a php script that will find and show me threads with identical titles, but it still will take a lot of manual labor, so before to dive in I'd like to be quite sure that I'n not gonna waist my time for nothing.

Do you have any knowledge on this one?

 

[Mr Lucky]

I always do this if I find such threads, I cannot swear to it but I do believe it helped with my site SEO and recovered from disastrous loss of traffic and indexing due to Google Panda changes.

I didn’t bother with redirects but I can see that would be useful if there area external links.

So I now use the similar threads addon which flags them up as people create or add to such threads

 

[Anatoliy]

I always do this if I find such threads

So what is the way to do it effective?
I have a list of duplicates with titles, urls, ids. Say I take a pair of duplicates. I open each thread page in a separate tab for merging. But I can't merge them from thread view. I have to mark them in forum view. If I do search by a title, I get not these two treads but 10 pages of them...
Any idea?

 

[Mr Lucky]

You should be able to from thread view. In moderator options drop down at top of each thread tick select for moderation on each.

Then once more than one thread is selected, at the bottom of the page you should be able to choose merge From the mod actions there.

First I check with google which is the highest ranking thread and merge into the that.

make a note of the other thread URLs first and do redirects in htaccess if necessary (especially if there are back links from other sites)

 

[Anatoliy]

In moderator options drop down at top of each thread tick select for moderation on each.

Thanks!