Correction Duplicate Page Title Problems for a Blog

[Romana]

EDITED: To just focus on the issue at hand.

I am trying to figure out the SEO rules instead of just working on the content.  Please bear with me.  I am adept technically.  I just do not know the rules of the SEO process or even some of the termology.

So I’m trying to attack problems one at time.

Today’s problem – **Duplicate Page Titles **

We evidently have thousands of Duplicate Page Titles.

We are using Joomla 2.5 & Easyblog.  Our sitemap is automated from XML Sitemap

Easyblog takes the title of the sites and uses it for a name of the summary pages.  We post 5 blog items per page and all the names are the same.

http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=5               Page Title =  Site Name

http://www.OursiteName.com/?start=10             Page Title =  Site Name

A similar thing happens on the sorting by Author or Category etc etc.    Basically non-duplicate pages are looking like duplicates.

What is the best practice / approach?

Using the Robot.txt or XML Sitemap to tell Google not to crawl these pages?

Writing a script or edit the Easyblog code to edit the 2000 duplicate Page Titles?

Other thoughts?

[Romana]

None of the blog titles have the same entry.

[Highland]

Now your blog titles being duplicate would be a problem. I would address those and make sure they use the title of the article. That is a worthwhile endeavor and I would undertake it immediately.

Remember, list pages exist to link to the blogs. They will always have that issue. Content pages should avoid this.

[Romana]

Thank you for your thoughts.

I would believe the statement if the 30th September update to Google had not moved us from the 5 page to beyond the 30 page. Clearly some structure is affecting our position.

So since SEOMOZ is indicating over 1500 Duplicate Titles.  I would like to address these. And the blog pages are over 600 of these duplicate titles.

If setting the structure doesn't work then I will look at other things.  But structure of the website first.

[Highland]

Your problem is that your partners are more popular than you are. Let's say you write an article on rodeo clowns. It's picked up by 5 newspapers. Google now has 6 copies and has to pick between sites. So which wins? The most popular site. A newspaper site is going to be a natural link attractant as people cross-link stories on blogs and forums all the time. I would get your newspaper pals to link back to you in their attribution.

As to your question about the listing pages, I wouldn't worry about that, especially if you write new content all the time. Yes, the title tags are the same but, if I'm looking for the aforementioned rodeo clown article, I don't want a listing page anyways, I want the relevant content. I am, of course, assuming your actual content pages have relevant title tags already. You could canonical them, I suppose, but that's more for duplicate content, not duplicate titles. Don't exclude these pages from crawling, however. You'll find your new content might not be found, especially if it falls off the front page quickly.

Remember, SEOMOZ exists to let you know about potential problems. It's not a gospel report, where you have to fix EVERYTHING or never rank well. It's a good starting point and it's up to you to figure out what to do with that information.