Promoting Articles creating duplicate content...

I was thinking this may have been discussed, but cannot seem to find it.

If articles are being posted in the forum and then promoted to CMS... this is obviously creating duplicate content. Does this not hurt SEO?

Also... since it is somewhat related, if you allow comments on the articles, you could have the author following two sets of comments, which would not be ideal.

How should this all be handled?

Thanks!

I recommend:

robots.txt out your vbcms-comments/ forum (whatever rewrite it happens to be) so that only comments in the CMS itself will be indexed.

I also recommend hard deleting the thread (or move it without redirect to a private staff area/recycle bin/etc) and setting up a custom redirect from its forum url to the cms url.

assuming this generic rewrite

'forum-name/thread-123/' => 'content/article-456/'

So I would need to create a custom rewrite for every thread? We are talking in the hundreds and eventually thousands. YIKES!

I don't even have a robots.txt file for this site yet... not even sure what to use on the version 4 vB.

I am also not familiar with what vbcms-comments/ forum is or how it works.

In other words... I am just plain dumb about right now.

The best thing to do is to write them in the CMS in the first place. If you expect users to contribute, set up an article depository forum that is only viewable to staff, but members can post and see their own threads (all easy to set up with vb's persmission manager). Then, put it into the CMS manually or promote it and there will never be a source to redirect from in the first place (bots will see the cms article as the original).

vb4 robots is basically the same thing....
Tutorial how to make a good robots.txt file - vBulletin SEO Forums

vbcms-comments is the default forum that is created for storing the cms comments. Any replies shown on the cms are actually 'posts' in this hidden forum. If you make it members only, than guests can't see comments, so the only good thing to do is to robots it out. The actual url may vary depending on your url rewrite preset format.