Duplicate title issue

[skill-guru]

During the crwal SEO moz found duplicate title problems with quite a good number of pages. This was because my site has test questions like

http://www.skill-guru.com/12/scjp-5-mock-test/questions

and when user does next or previous, they can traverse to different pages but the title and descrition would remain same.

How can this probkem be resolved ?

[Hondaspeder]

You could change the title/description for each page reflecting the content, but that would take forever and probably doesn't fluctuate much page to page (on that specific test.) Optionally you could try using meta robots, but you may not rank when people search specific code snippets (or other test questions.)

name="robots" content="FOLLOW,NOINDEX" />

You might try out using ajax for the pages as in googles eyes it would only be considered one page. Hope it's helped.

[Getz.pro]

This is a great example of good canonical usage.

http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/canonicalization

[Hondaspeder]

Technically it's not duplicate content. If he gets traffic to particular keywords phrases from the test content then canonicalization would hurt his traffic. The traffic from the keywords might not be targeted to test takers, but if that's your only form of traffic then rel canonical would hurt; BAD. Please, correct me if I'm wrong though.

From google:

Must the content on a set of pages be similar to the content on the canonical version?

Yes. The rel="canonical" attribute should be used only to specify the preferred version of many pages with identical content (although minor differences, such as sort order, are okay).

You should probably research for yourself before you take anyone's advice: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=139394

Personally though, I'd look into ajax. There are many freely available resources that you can use. Hope that helps.

[skill-guru]

In my case the contents are different. It is only the title and keywords which are repeated across pages. Since keywords tag is not important anymore, it is only the title which is hurting me.

[Hondaspeder]

The only thing I can suggest would be Ajax, but I'm sure someone more knowledgeable than myself will have a better answer for you. In any case, good luck.

[Dr-Pete]

That's a really tough one. For paginated search results, I would normally go with @128K's suggestion - let Google follow the search results, but don't index them. Unfortunately, these are both search results AND your content, which is a bit unusual.

I would still consider the META robots tag. Here's my argument - while all of these results are unique, landing on question #21 isn't very useful to search visitors, and they might bounce. It probably makes more sense to land them all on page #1. While you'll lose some indexable content, I suspect the higher conversion and loss of duplicates would offset that.

Rand had a good post about pagination, but again, it assumes a more typical search-results scenario (like a list of product snippets and titles):

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience

Likewise, the pages aren't duplicates, so I'd avoid the canonical tag, in the usual sense. There are viable AJAX approaches, but some will make the full content invisible to spiders.

There are SEOs who advocate using the canonical tag, but canonicalizing to a version of the page that displays ALL of the results on one page. That way, visitors still go through the list, but Google would see the full page of answers. You could also default Google to a different count of results/page (like 100) but then default visitors to 10, etc. It borders on cloaking, but it's off-white at worst, in my opinion.