Pin the Tail on the SEO Donkey (with Link Consensus)!

Re-posted from: Value beyond mod-rewrites

Related read: Google Duplicate Duplicate Content | Threadwatch.org

Originally Posted by Mikkel deMib Svendsen

Duplicate content can very well become a problem and the last thing on earth you want to do is let the engines decide what to do about it. In my experience, the engines far too often make the wrong decision.

This is not at all about "penalty" - whoever said that? It is about making a good an relevant index - and you just don't do that by filling it up with duplicate content. None of the engies currently do perfect duplicate filtering but they do get better and one day you may loose everything because you let the engines decide how to deal with your crap. Thats not a good long-term strategy!

Another problem is link structures. If there are multiple URL's to the same content some people will link to one version and other people to another version.

and this post:

Originally Posted by Brian Turner

Originally Posted by joeychgo

But what he pointed out is not a problem in regards to duplicate content.

Yes it is a problem, though - and while I may have pointed out the archive issue, let's point out just a few of the duplicate pages you can get listed in SERPs for *the same page content* of your main thread page:
- showthread (normal)
- archive
- printthread
- &mode=threaded
- &mode=linear
- mode=hybrid&t=
- &mode=threaded
- &goto=nextoldest
- &goto=nextnewest
- goto=newpost&t=
- goto=lastpost&t=

Let me underline it: vbulletin does have a problem with duplicating content.

Now, while you can sit back and allow the search engines to try and work out which is the most important page, the fact remains that Google especially can have real problems with it and end up listing your less favourable URLs. I've seen this happen especially with the BigDaddy migrations.

Added to that, the way the threaded options are set up means that even if you disable the DHTML menu for that option in the vb admin panel, (until very recently at least) these options were still displayed to non-Javascripted enabled browsers - such as Googlebot.

Overall, vbulletin has bad issues with duplicated content, and this duplicating of content can cause problems because at the end of the day, you want visitors clicking through from the SERPs to find your main thread directly, instead of being shunted off into a different page format for the same content.

Simply redesigning the archive may go some way to addressing this - but in doing so you are simply dressing up duplicated content to try and not look like duplicated content while you are doing so - which is sort of missing the point.

And so far as I'm aware, you can't use a different template for the last/next/previous/threaded view posts because they are all runing from the main template.

I'm not trying to knock you, joeychicago - but I am trying to point out that since the first vb3 beta release, duplicated content has been an issue and continues to be an issue, and this doesn't seem to be something you're taking into consideration.

No, there isn't a direct penalty, and for most webmasters - they couldn't care less - especially as a vb forum bulked up with duplicate content it can stroke the webmaster's ego on the site:command to see tens of thousands of pages indexed.

But the duplicate content issue isn't an optimal position for any webmaster who wants to get more aggressive on SEO/traffic targeting.