Duplicate content problems

[paul]

Admin

Just noticed there is a problem with duplicate content on this site which is no doubt affecting traffic.

I did a quick look to see how many pages were listed in google and was surprised to see over 45,000.

After a bit of digging I see the problem is there are 5 different ways of getting to each page.

If you take a unique page title and enclose it in quotes you will see the problem click here

Other files that are bloating the index and probably diluting the power of the content pages are newreply.php? & sendmessage.php? especially newreply.php

If you blocked these in your robots.txt file or some other way I'm sure you would see an increase in traffic.

Just my 2 cents ;-)

 

[gromy]

Your search for "Selling domains - contract of sale?" returned 19 English pages and 91 Google Ads in 0.38 seconds.

 

[paul]

yes but only results 1,3,4,6,& 7 are duplicates of the same page

 

[Admin]

Well spotted Paul, I have updated my robots.txt file as follows:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /admin/ 
Disallow: /db/ 
Disallow: /images/ 
Disallow: /includes/ 
Disallow: /language/ 
Disallow: /templates/ 
Disallow: /common.php 
Disallow: /groupcp.php 
Disallow: /memberlist.php 
Disallow: /modcp.php 
Disallow: /posting.php 
Disallow: /profile.php 
Disallow: /privmsg.php 
Disallow: /viewonline.php 
Disallow: /faq.php 
Disallow: /updates-topic.html*$ 
Disallow: /stop-updates-topic.html*$ 
Disallow: /ptopic*.html$ 
Disallow: /ntopic*.html$
Disallow: /announcement.php
Disallow: /faq.php
Disallow: /forumdisplay.php
Disallow: /login.php
Disallow: /member.php
Disallow: /newreply.php
Disallow: /newthread.php
Disallow: /printthread.php
Disallow: /search.php
Disallow: /showthread.php

Any idea how long before Google reacts?

Thanks for the heads up, appreacited.

Admin

 

[paul]

I found a page in the google index this week from one of my sites that I deleted about 4 years ago, so your guess is as good as mine. I suppose it all depends on how often they spider those pages on your site.