So I'm looking at Webmaster tools, and I notice it saying "Duplicate title tags 72"
All 72 of those are a result of the forums.
For some reason it's picking up multiple same tags. But I don't think it's <title> I think it's saying I have too many <h1> tags or something. Something in the theme of MyBB must be messed up.
I don't use any SEO plugin for MyBB because it slows down the site, and I don't think it will help that much.
I've never heard of this before so the chances of it being a MyBB problem are slim.
Have you added any meta tags or anything??
Well, in the forum view, the default MyBB theme does put site name first in the title and forum name second. It should be the other way around (if you decide to put site name everywhere at all), for practical reasons, and also because Google likes distinctive titles.
Practical reasons see screenshot... I opened several forums in tabs, can you tell which tab is which forum? (No, because MyBB uses a title like 'site name - forum name' instead of 'forum name - site name'). However this is a one line change in the theme, just switch two variables in the whatever it is called template.
That's the only problem I'm aware of regarding stock MyBB and titles... pages that are not forums do have proper titles by default (i.e. threads do have the thread title as title, even without site name, which is good).
Unfortunatly my only public MyBB forum right now is the Google SEO demo forum, and it's neither stock nor large enough for Google Webmaster tools to be of any use. I'll look into issues such as this more once I have a larger public forum (not before March 09).
I don't know you're welcome to examine it:
http://www.infernodevelopment.com/forum
I think it's more of a Google Webmaster Tools error than anything else:
Here's what it says, 105 duplicate title tags (from 72 last week).
Under General Chat it says this:
"
Inferno Development Forums - General Chat
/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&datecut=0&page=1&sortby=starter&order=desc/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&datecut=0&page=1&sortby=subject&order=desc/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&datecut=0&page=1&sortby=views&order=asc/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&page=1&sortby=replies&order=asc/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&page=1&sortby=starter/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&page=1&sortby=subject/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&page=1&sortby=views&order=asc"
This seems to make sense, if you click on different sorting, high res, low res, different pages, then same tag will exist, so I'm thinking "is Google developers that dumb to make such a silly mistake?"
Did you forget the line breaks here or is "/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&datecut=0&page=1&sortby=starter&order=desc/forum/forumdisplay.php?fid=2&datecut" etc. meant to be a single link?
If it's a single link then something on your forum would produce infinite links which could confuse not only Google.
Other than that Google should be smart enough to figure out which parameters are relevant to an URL and which ones are not. Google claims to be smart enough for that in their docs anyhow.
I have no idea, I copied it from webmaster tools, it should have line breaks.
Do you guys need a screenshot of this or something?
Check my forum, it's a very standard theme!
eXecute, I think I know why you are seeing the issue and I don't. It's because I use SEO URLs and block forumdisplay.php (and other .php) completely by robots.txt. Even when using SEO URLs, the sorting links stay forumdisplay.php?fid=x&sortby... so they are blocked by robots.txt on my forum.
See here my comment regarding SEO URLs in MyBB.
http://community.mybboard.net/thread-423...#pid295949
It turns out Google does not like pages with sorting parameters very much. You should use a robots.txt to prevent Google from indexing those URLs.