Duplicate Title Tags

Hi Steve,

Thanks. I agree with you.
But even if you simply have Prev / Next you would still get different URLs for different pages in Joomla and you would again end up with duplicate titles. Do you think these duplicate titles hurt the page rank of the site?

What would you think the solution would be? Maybe using AJAX pagination where URL would remain the same (with just a different anchor)? Then Google should not treat them as different pages.
Like in my gallery:
joomla.sakic.net/the-news/latest-news/ajax-photo-album/#1
joomla.sakic.net/the-news/latest-news/ajax-photo-album/#4
etc.

Thanks again for the SEO expert insight.

Just to expand a little bit on this (useful) topic, some of the "Duplicate Title Tags" (and "Duplicated Meta Descriptions", too) warnings generated by Google Webmaster Tools are indeed caused by SEF Advance if your site use the 'Print icon'.

What happens is that if you have the Print icon enabled in your articles, SEF Advance gently tranforms the links of the pages in www.yoursite.it/section/category/article but it also add the url www.yoursite.it/section/category/article/print to the printer friendly version of it.

I think this is very useful but Google does not like it too much.
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to it.

Just add this line to your robots.txt file
and be patient. It took Google a couple of months on my site to remove the undesidered printer frienfly versions from the index and the corresponding Duplicate Title/Description warnings.

Stefano

I quite like this post - maybe a dedicated post for robots.txt will be handy on this forum ..

Anyway, I found adding

Disallow: /index.php

A handy one too as I was getting lots of error messages from URL's that started that way and with SEF Advance you don't really want Google indexing anything starting with index.php

Only my 2p

We are having this same issue. It is not an SEF Advance issue, but I would be willing to pitch in for a patch or something. We have a blog on our site and webmaster tools also shows duplicate title errors. I don't want to have to manually add the titles because every time you tweak something, there is a potential to spin off a different error in webmaster tools. Is there a way to do something that either just ads a page number or a post range:

Our first page of our blog is at:
http://www.apartmentsphoenix.com/phoenix-for-rent-blog/news/

if you scroll down and go to page two it is:
http://www.apartmentsphoenix.com/phoenix-for-rent-blog/news/5/

Can SEF Advance rewrite based on the number appended "Blog Name - Page 2" or "Blog Name - Posts Dated xx-xx-xxxx - xx-xx-xxxx". That is all that would be required to avoid the error in Webmaster Tools. I guess technically it could even just append the number from the end of the URL, nobody is really looking at each title page of your blog. The slickest thing would be to take the first keyword from each blog on that page and add it to the title, but that would be way outside of the scope of this component.

To add to cazzani's comment about adding the disallow, it does take months, but you can also add the individual pages you are getting errors with to your robots.txt for a few months and tell Google to remove them in Webmaster Tools and they are gone in a couple of days, but if you don't add the individual pages on there for a few months, they will return after 60 or 90 days I forget which.

OK, as I see it becomes important issue I will have a look if it can be added to SEF Advance.

As always, you are one of the true stars of Joomla!  ;D