SEO Tycoon

**Learnin' n00b** · 05-11-2011, 11:35 PM

I'm starting a website that uses phpBB as the back-end software. So obviously there's a forum part of my website, but I also want an articles section. The easiest way I've found to implement this is to write my articles as posts in the forum, and then "pull" the posts from the database and display them on what looks like a static html page on the website.

So now that you know what I'm doing, the question is about the duplicate content problem (or not problem?) that this creates, since the content exists in the forum thread and also on what appears to be the static article page. Will a search engine penalize me for doing this? If so, I can probably find a different way of doing the articles, but the way I'm doing it right now is actually working really well so I'd like to stick with it if possible

Appreciate your advice.

**mpw45233** · 05-11-2011, 11:54 PM

I don't really have any clear advice for you. But I created some duplicate problems for myself due to my complete ignorance of how Wordpress blogs operate.

I would say, don't create any duplicate content issues. Though some people say that duplicate content doesn't matter, I'd say don't do it.

I can't say for sure, but it's not worth it. This is just my opinion btw

.

Cheers

**chrishirst** · 05-12-2011, 09:56 AM

Why not just use this?

**Learnin' n00b** · 05-12-2011, 11:04 AM

Thanks for both of your advice.

@Chris

I've looked at a few article/blog mods, but none of them seem well supported, and I couldn' even find a working demo for that one..

Also, I've been thinking about this duplicate content issue, and doesn't it already exist with forums? A post can be indexed with many different URLs, such as:

http://example.com/forum.php?p=42
http://example.com/forum.php?f=20&t=6
http://example.com/forum.php?f=20&t=6#p10

And maybe there are more ways I can't think of...

**chrishirst** · 05-12-2011, 12:08 PM

Absolutely! Most forum systems create multiple URLs for their pages and it's not really a big deal, SEs will figure out which page the "important" one and simply filter out the rest.

Are you married to the hackers delight of PHPBB? If not, I would suggest using SMF with the article mod works well for this side project

**chrishirst** · 05-12-2011, 12:14 PM

duplicate content by the way is more about using the same content on several SITES such as aliased domains or having canonical "issues", rather than having a "onsite" problem with duplicate URLs.

With forum duplicate URIs you can simply block many of the duplicates such as the "lo-fi" or print versions enmasse with robots.txt.

**abdur** · 05-12-2011, 01:13 PM

i agree with chrishirst's last reply...and in my opinion you can have duplicate content on the same site..

**Learnin' n00b** · 05-13-2011, 10:36 AM

Thanks for sharing the info about SMF. I wasn't aware that there were any good, free alternatives to phpBB. In looking at SMF, it appears that many people prefer both SMF and myBB over phpBB. I'll have to look into them more, but for now I think I'm going to stick with phpBB since I've invested a lot of time customizing a theme and installing mods.

Quote:

Originally Posted by chrishirst

duplicate content by the way is more about using the same content on several SITES such as aliased domains or having canonical "issues", rather than having a "onsite" problem with duplicate URLs.

With forum duplicate URIs you can simply block many of the duplicates such as the "lo-fi" or print versions enmasse with robots.txt.

So if I have a bunch of articles with URLs like:

http://example.com/articles.php?p=42

And then there are the "regular" forum URLs that point to the thread or post, do you think I should add a robots.txt file in my root directory with something like:

Code:

user-agent: googlebot 
noindex: /articles.php
disallow: /articles.php

Or would it actually be beneficial for my site's Google rankings if googlebot is allowed to crawl the articles?

**chrishirst** · 05-13-2011, 10:56 AM

Google's choice is that you allow them to be crawled and they will figure which urls to show and which to "combine" they are pretty good at it.

**chrishirst** · 05-13-2011, 10:57 AM

Ah the bell rang eventually.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJMFYpYQZ0c

**Learnin' n00b** · 05-13-2011, 11:06 AM

OK, I'll just go ahead and forget about robots.txt then

Although, the video is confusing because the guy makes it sound like you shouldn't block the content and then takes a 180 degree reversal saying "probably just go ahead and block these dupes using robots.txt."

**chrishirst** · 05-13-2011, 11:21 AM

Just a slip of the tongue, Vanessa Fox said the same thing about letting Google sort out dupes when she was in charge of the sitemap team.

It's the "near duplicates" or "madlib spam" they will have an "issue" with, where you have a page for every town or district and the only thing that changes on the page is the town name.

Exact copies are very easy to "spot" algorithmically and this is where the real PR value comes into play for deciding which copy to display.

**Learnin' n00b** · 05-13-2011, 01:05 PM

OK, thanks a lot for all your help. I feel much better about doing this now

**edgray** · 05-17-2011, 06:16 PM

I found an interesting article on duplicate content written by some random bloke/oracle, you might find this helpful.

**Benmoore47** · 05-18-2011, 12:01 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by abdur

i agree with chrishirst's last reply...and in my opinion you can have duplicate content on the same site..

If there is a duplicate content, the only solution here is to re-write / revise the page.