Duplicate Content Issues with Forum

[shapefit]

Hi Everyone,

I just signed up last night and received the crawl stats for my site (ShapeFit.com). Since April of 2011, my site has been severely impacted by Google's Panda and Penguin algorithm updates and we have lost about 80% of our traffic during that time. I have been trying to follow the guidelines provided by Google to fix the issues and help recover but nothing seems to be working. The majority of my time has been invested in trying to add content to "thin" pages on the site and filing DMCA notices for copyright infringement issues. Since this work has not produced any noticeable recovery, I decided to focus my attention on removing bad backlinks and this is how I found SEOmoz.

My question is about duplicate content. The crawl diagnostics showed 6,000 errors for duplicate page content and the same for duplicate page title. After reviewing the details, it looks like almost every page is from the forum (shapefit.com/forum). What's the best way to resolve these issues? Should I completely block the "forum" folder from being indexed by Google or is there something I can do within the forum software to fix this (I use phpBB)?

I really appreciate any feedback that would help fix these issues so the site can hopefully start recovering from Panda/Penguin.

Thank you,

Kris

[shapefit]

Hi Alan,

Thanks for your feedback. In regards to thin content, do you know if there is a certain minimum requirement of textual content that should be on a page? I have read a few articles that recommend having at least 300 words for each page. Do you know if there any validity to this?

I appreciate your input about the forum issues. I will look into adding/updating the robots file to block everything but the main posts.

What are your thoughts on removing bad backlinks and how critical is this for Panda/Pengiun recovery? There are so many areas to work on but only so many hours in the day

Thanks,

Kris

[AlanBleiweiss]

Kris,

The ideal scenario is to eliminate or consolidate content that exists on extremely thin pages on a site.  When it comes to forums, consolidation is a near impossibility technically and likely to cause problems for usability.  As a result of those challenges, the best course of action would to either eliminate the content entirely or block the forums from indexation via robots.txt file.

If there is any potential for any of the forum content being of value from a search engine perspective, it would likely be a case where you'd want to keep the core forum posts indexable but block the member pages.

Unfortunately there's no one answer and no true way to gauge the impact on any action you choose without actually taking that action and then waiting to see what happens.