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As this question is rather old but still is marked as "unanswered" I take the liberty to post an answer this late which I hope not only you will benefit from but all other webmasters/SEOs with similar issues.

First of all: Duplicate pages and therefrom duplicate title-tags etc. are of course meant to be taken serious but there are no easy fixes in my opinion and especially not if your design and database set-up is causing large amounts of duplicated content.

But is it a big problem Google-wise? I have my doubts based on conflicting signs and indications given by Google Webmaster Tools and the SERPs in general.

An example I just dug up for you: One of the big players in the field of recipes (allrecipes.com) has +5.000 search results indexed by Google ALL with duplicate title-tags which would bring up all the red flags in the Dashboard.

But based on Googles trends for searches, allrecipes.com are still outperforming their closest competitors. Their search result-urls are unique but all have the same title-tag...so +5.000 duplicate title-tags is probably not really a problem in their perspective.

What to do then?

All though your website seems to have been designed with quite a few potential problems built into its core I would personally hesitate spending a lot of resources on fixing it, especially if your traffic from Google is not taking a bashing.

Eventually your website will be in need for a design re-do and perhaps a change of content management system/database system.

Plan ahead and make sure that you will be able to control this issue in your next version.

It could f. i. be by having all search results appear more like individual pages with individual urls. With a little bit of effort you could make each search result unique with unique title tag and url and thereby bring more traffic to your site.

Best of luck with your efforts

Jens Peter

This is true - The content is always a good read but the journalists often ask me how to do research which will help them perform better in search engines.

I have tried to show them how to look at Google keyword databases and to see what their readers are looking for however this tends to slow down their work (they need to produce a ton of articles everyday) so this angle is not really working.

I am therefore looking for someone with a track-record of helping journalists writing more and better articles in a way that works better with searchengines than "ordinary" content/article creation does.

Maybe it is an impossible task...or not at all necessary but I owe it to my clients to look under every rock before I tell them that it is impossible to improve what they are already doing :-).

Robert,

I have been working with SEO for +11 years which I should have mentioned ;o). My bad.

My reason for asking is that I service a couple of large online media-sites and the journalists dont really want to read long SEO-books etc....they need hands-on advice for writing seo-friendly articles online. I am aware that the rules of good SEO applies to their needs/what they should do but I find it difficult to come across good whitepapers/books etc. written with the aim of helping journalists in their daily job. They create most of the content online but know very little about SEO-friendly content. Be aware that their Content Management System is already well tuned for SEO so the technical part is take care of.

I am looking for a white paper or similar focused on helping journalists (online) writing better and more SEO-friendly content.

If you know of anything or anyone who might be of help I would love to hear from you.

Hi,

I am working for a large mobil-site (+200.000 pages), to improve their SEO, and am trying to figure out the best way to set up a linkbuilding strategy for the site.

The urls are very dynamic and often rather long so deep linking is difficult.

Any input/ideas would be welcome

Jens Peter

This is true - The content is always a good read but the journalists often ask me how to do research which will help them perform better in search engines.

I have tried to show them how to look at Google keyword databases and to see what their readers are looking for however this tends to slow down their work (they need to produce a ton of articles everyday) so this angle is not really working.

I am therefore looking for someone with a track-record of helping journalists writing more and better articles in a way that works better with searchengines than "ordinary" content/article creation does.

Maybe it is an impossible task...or not at all necessary but I owe it to my clients to look under every rock before I tell them that it is impossible to improve what they are already doing :-).