Duplicate Page title - PHP Experts!

[nahopkin]

After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation.

for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose.

.com/?lang=en&limit=5

.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25

Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated.

What should i do?

[RyanKent]

Let me preface by saying I am not a PHP expert. I do have some familiarity with PHP and the issue you mention.

The bottom line, you do not wish to use the same title for multiple URLs. Using the URLs you shared, some possible titles would be:

Best Restaurants in Miami

Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 3

Best Restaurants in Miami - Page 4

You need to adjust your site code to add a page number to the existing URLs. Most popular software is set up to do this automatically.

[MarieHaynes]

I'm not sure if this will answer your question or just confuse things, but here's my take on the situation.

Are the pages all duplicate content, or are the titles just duplicated?  If this is all the exact same page but simply with a different url then the solution is to use a rel canonical tag.  (See http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=139394).  This tells Google what the original version of the page is and to not index the other pages.

However, if these are all different pages and you are trying to create a unique title for each then there are some ways to do this.  Like Ryan mentioned, if you're using a CMS (i.e. Wordpress) there's likely a plugin that will do this for you.  But, if you have a static site then here is what I do.  I have a static site and I have a page called, let's say, www.example.com/information?id=123.  I have thousands of these pages but they all have different content.  The content is generated from a database.

So, what I do is I put php in the head of the page, before the title.  The php reads the database and grabs some information about the page and stores that information in a variable called $title.  Then, in the title tag I do this:

<title><?php echo $title; ?></title>

Hopefully that makes sense!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Both Ryan and Marie provided good answers, but let me elaborate further.

This is not a php thing. You can verify this yourself by visiting these pages.

Does the page content change when you visit /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20 and switch to /?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20? If these look like the same page, then you have a duplicate content/title issue on your hands.

Google's take on the matter is simple...

"Provide one version of a URL to reach a document

To prevent users from linking to one version of a URL and others linking to a different version (this could split the reputation of that content between the URLs), focus on using and referring to one URL in the structure and internal linking of your pages. If you do find that people are accessing the same content through multiple URLs, setting up a 301 redirect from non-preferred URLs to the dominant URL is a good solution for this. You may also use canonical URL or use the rel="canonical" link element if you cannot redirect"

You have several options to deal with this, depending on the content_._

• Use the canonical tag to point the different versions of the page towards a single, definitive URL. Best to use this option only if the pages are actually duplicate.
• If the pages are not duplicate in content, but duplicate in title, then make sure your CMS writes unique title tags for every unique page of content, as Marie describes.
• If these extra pages are producing lists of only slightly varying entries, like a list of blog archives, you may consider adding a Meta Robots tag to NOINDEX, FOLLOW those superfluous pages.
• If dealing with pagination, here's an excellent article from Adam Audette to help.

This is a tricky area, and you must be careful when dealing with duplicate content, because it's easy to make a mistake and have Google de-index your content. That said, by correcting these errors, you just might see an improvement in your indexation and traffic stats.