Are ALL duplicate title tags bad??

[RG_SEO]

We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix.

A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”!  These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me.

One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it.

Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are?

Any help would be appreciated

[Er_Maqui]

That's not something bad really. You can have some duplicates titles, but, think the title it's one of the factors for getting your keywords. If you have duplicates titles, you have some pages searching the SEO for the same keyword. But it's isn't bad, i think.

Different is if you have a complete webpage, with the same title at all pages, and title doesn't have relation with content. That's really bad, i think.

Also, for google duplicated content it isn't the same title, it's the same content. If your page is a forum, i can understand you have the same title for similar posts, but they content aren't the same.

[David-Kley]

Well, if someone is searching for "need help" you should rank really high. Excellent!

Just kidding. Since your site is a forum, isn't there a way as an admin to go in and manually change it to display what the topic is about?

Second, is it going to drive that much traffic to yoru site by changing these, that you should invest the labor in changing 1000's of page titles? You should know your audience and incoming traffic enough to decide if it makes a difference.

The content is different on each page, so I wouldn't really get stressed out about being penailized for duplicate content, BUT you arent doing the site any favors by having duplications of the first thing displayed in search results either.

[SamuelScott]

I'm pretty sure that Google can tell that it is a forum with user-generated content, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. However, the key to look out for is to see if people are using the user-generated content to spam for their own purposes.

That's what got MyBlogGuest in trouble, and it's likely why Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Voices. It's not anything they did -- it's what others did via their websites.

[RG_SEO]

Thanks for those answers, that's really useful. It sounds like this is not something to worry about too much, but something that is not ideal for the site's appearance in the search results!