Forum being heavily penalised

[gaz3342]

Hi everyone,

I've just signed up for Moz and I'm getting well and truly stuck in. I have just completed my first site crawl and have a frightening 5,363 errors and 25,319 warnings.

The main culprit is the forum on my site, it contains hundreds of pages dating from as far back as 2002. It is full of Duplicate Content, Duplicate page titles and a fair few 404 errors where old links are now outdated.

Can anyone advise what would be the best course of action? Should I hide the whole forum from Google's robots? My only concern with doing this is the loss of hundreds of pages of regularly updated content which I feel is boosting SEO.

Help!

Thanks guys

[EGOL]

"Should I hide the whole forum from Google's robots?"

Heavens, NO.

If you want good, reliable, actionable advice a lot more information will be needed.

Anybody who tosses out ideas based upon what you shared is shooting at a blurry target.

Also, this type of problem is not one that can be diagnosed by a person who spends 20 minutes surfing  through your website and 20 minutes typing you an answer.  They will probably need to get under the hood.

Consider hiring someone who has experience with the forum software that you are using and knows how to structure them for optimum treatment by google.

[gaz3342]

Thanks for your reply EGOL.

I agree that hiding the whole forum wouldn't be the greatest idea but I just wonder how heavily my main site is being penalised due to the thousands of Duplicate Page Titles / Content in my forum?

Is there a way of hiding just the page titles of my forum pages or is it all or nothing?

Thanks again

Gareth

[EGOL]

I am not an expert on forums.

In general, you can noindex/follow the individual threads if they are causing a problem.

The category pages might be SEOed to pull traffic and they could be planned to pull traffic on valuable topics.

But, before those things are done you should get an assessment from someone who has watched and experimented with forums to get best results.

That's about all I can say on this topic.

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Are you referring to duplicate meta titles or actually pages that are the same>

if it is meta then I would personally setup dynamic meta tags as a quick fix.  I would then make it pull from the titles of each post , this way you will have unique meta tags and cut down on some errors quickly.  You can obviously still define the pages you want to define like your home page with manual tags instead of dynamic.

Again that is a quick fix instead of going over 1000's of pages all at once.  This is better than hiding the whole site.

Have a great night.

Matthew Boley

[mafiasecurity]

What software are you using for the forum? phpBB, SMF, YaBBa, vB, IPB, MyBB etc?

[gaz3342]

Great advice Matthew, I have actually gone through and setup dynamic meta tags as you suggested, I'm hoping that should get rid of the majority of duplicate titles.

Mafiasecurity - The software is Snitz Forums 2000.

Thanks for your answers guys!

[MarketingOfAmerica]

Your welcome.  If that was your issue and you have a lot of pages, I am sure this will help a lot.

Have a great day and happy holidays.