Advice / Help with simliar post titles

[luwhosjack]

Does anyone know if the new google ove optimisation penalties would be actioned for similar post titles? We have a back catalouge of our magazines online and each title is very simliar ie magazine name - issue number - month.

These have been flagged up by the SEO Moz pro service as being duplicate content but although each post is laid out the same each has different content with int it.

the titles however are all very simliar - is this a bad idea and also if so what would be a better way of grouping the posts so that the titles are different enough - would the main subject of each magazine included be enough?

Thanks

[BenFox]

I would guess that including the main subject of each post in the title would de-duplicate it enough.

Have you noticed any issues with the pages getting indexed?

[luwhosjack]

yep, they barely come up so I have begun to change the page titles, the only thing is that I don't want to change all the actual addresses becuase people have linked to them and I will loose a lot of links that way. Do you think changing title of the post will be enough or will I have to go ahead and change the actual link as well?

Thanks for the advice, appreciated.

[BenFox]

I reckon you'll be fine just changing the title tags in this case.

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi There,

SEOmoz flags your content as duplicate if finds 95% HTML similarity. You can use an online tool to compare pages yourself. I like this one:

http://www.duplicatecontent.net/

Google obviously uses a more sophisticated method than Moz, but it's still a good warning because pages without much unique content - even if they aren't true duplicates - often have a difficult time ranking for their targeted keywords.

In general, it good to have different title tags for each page of content. This most important at the beginning of the title tag. You raised the suggestion of using the main subject of each magazine - which sounds like an excellent idea to me!

Hope this helps. Best of luck with your SEO!