Topics View

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Topics View

Harvey
Guys the new meta/title tags feature is fantastic.

I still notice an issue with TOPICS VIEW.   The system doesn't treat them as separate pages.  Essentially if I change the meta description on topics view it changes it on MAIN VIEW too.  My title tags don't do that, but I suspect that that is because you guys did a custom hack for me that this overriding it.

Maybe all TOPICS VIEW pages should be no follow, if that won't make the main view nofollow. Right now when you google my forum you see two basically identical views. While I realise this may not technically be duplicate content, I rather come up with a solution that doesn't look like duplicate content:



Also it's very odd that the title tags are reversed. The MAIN VIEW above is indexed with the title tags for the TOPICS VIEW.  The title tag that ends with " ..." is the TOPICS view title tag.
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Re: Topics View

Peter <Nabble>
Ok, we will investigate it.
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
This post was updated on .
This issue of duplicate title tags and meta descriptions is complex.

One thing that I think would help - eliminate topics view in all sub-forums. It's only really useful in my forum at the top level, because my forums only have 2 levels total.

Could you eliminate topics view from my subforums?
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Re: Topics View

Peter <Nabble>
I would have to check but Im pretty sure I can.
Are you sure about it?
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
Well... it creates duplicate titles and descriptions and at the bottom forum level it's basically already a topics view right?

Am I missing something?
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
Could Topics views be no follow?  Would that work better?

Or could we do something with the "canonical" tag?
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Re: Topics View

Hugo <Nabble>
Harvey, you are right. The "Topics View" link shouldn't be displayed if the forum or sub-forum doesn't have child forums. We fixed this, please take a look. Thanks for bringing this to our attention.
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
This is VERY cool. It will eliminate a significant number of my (dupe titles/description) errors in webmaster tools. Did you do this universally or just custom for my apps?

At the top level where it is useful - could we make TOPICS no follow? Should we?
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
I just did some investigating. It looks like the TOPICS view still exists, event though the link to it is gone:

http://www.nyskiblog.com/p/harvey-road-forum.html#nabble-f2194703.topics

I think that means it will remain in the index?
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Re: Topics View

Peter <Nabble>
We will take a look.
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Re: Topics View

Peter <Nabble>
Google should forget this page soon.
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
I'm interested to see.  It's really a page that exists, so I don't totally understand how it would be removed from the index. Don't pages come out because they return an error when visited?
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Re: Topics View

Hugo <Nabble>
The page may not be removed from the index, but its page rank will sink since no other pages are linking to it. So it should disappear from the search results.
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Re: Topics View

Hugo <Nabble>
In reply to this post by Harvey
Harvey44 wrote
I still notice an issue with TOPICS VIEW.   The system doesn't treat them as separate pages.  Essentially if I change the meta description on topics view it changes it on MAIN VIEW too.
This is not completely true. The meta tags (description/keywords) are only displayed on the app main page. The topics view doesn't have those tags (look at the source and you will confirm this). So changing those tags for your app will affect your main page only.
Harvey44 wrote
My title tags don't do that, but I suspect that that is because you guys did a custom hack for me that this overriding it.
Yes, you have custom NAML code to print custom titles. We should eventually remove that code to give you the ability to edit the titles from the interface, but this can wait if you prefer.
Harvey44 wrote
Maybe all TOPICS VIEW pages should be no follow, if that won't make the main view nofollow. Right now when you google my forum you see two basically identical views. While I realise this may not technically be duplicate content, I rather come up with a solution that doesn't look like duplicate content:
Let me give you some thoughts so that you can make a decision. What you really want here is actually a meta tag "robots" with "noindex,follow", which is different from nofollow (a "nofollow" meta tag would be a disaster, because it would tell google to skip all links on that page and your topics wouldn't be crawled – this is certainly not what you want). The "noindex, follow" would tell google to not index that page, but to follow the links and continue crawling all links available there (yes, that's what you want). The problem with that approach is that you won't be listed in the search results if someone looks for keywords that different topics alone don't have, but together on the topics view page they have. For example, topic 1 has a subject "AAA BBB CCC" and topic 2 has "XXX YYY ZZZ". If someone looks for "AAA XXX", only the topics page could have that combination. Please let me know what you think.
Harvey44 wrote
Also it's very odd that the title tags are reversed. The MAIN VIEW above is indexed with the title tags for the TOPICS VIEW.  The title tag that ends with " ..." is the TOPICS view title tag.
I was not able to reproduce this (maybe because I am not in the US right now?). How do you know the one with "..." is the topics one? Google doesn't reveal the contents of "...".
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Re: Topics View

Harvey
Regarding the custom Title tags hack - not sure I want it removed (?)  I like the fact that for POSTS I get a default title tag that I can then adjust if I want. Could I still have that?  Currently it's an issue because I have changed the way I do tags but the ones I can't edit are inconsistent with the ttags I can edit.

With regard to "nofollow" - you are right - I was thinking of no index, no follow (robots).  Looks like there is no simple, non-structural solution to cleaning up these meta errors.  It's not possible to remove the TOPIC view from certain parts of the app?

With regard to the "..." in the title tags - Google will display 69 or sometimes 70 characters of a title tag. I know the one with the  "..." is the TOPICS tag because the standard title tag is 69 characters and the TOPICS title tag has "| Topics" added to then end of it taking it over the limit.
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Re: Topics View

Peter <Nabble>
About the reversed titles, try to search and then click on cache instead of the link.

If you get redirected to your forum, do it again but click on "text only version" so you can see what Google got from your site. You will see that it seems the title is correctly displayed despite of the "...".
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