How to Make Forum Display Pages Unique In MyBB Forum

Few days back, while checking my sites in Google Webmaster tools, I found some Issues that were generated under [Google Webmaster Tools Dashboard > Diagnostics > Content analysis]. I saw some duplicate titles for my site. I was actually surprised to see these errors as I was sure that there were no duplicate pages in my site.

After analyzing the data in Google Webmaster tools, I found that those duplicate titles were generated because of MyBB forum in my site. On further investigation, I found the culprit that was generating the duplicate title issue.

In all Sub-Forums, the forum navigation was like this:

Pages (x): « First 1 2 3 4 5 Next > Last »

Now if you are at the Forum Display Page number one, then title of the page will be some thing like this:
Forum-Name Forum – Sub-forum-Name

Now if you open the second page in this sub-forum, you will see the older threads. But there is a problem. The same title that is generated for the first page of the sub-forum, which is:

Forum-Name Forum – Sub-forum-Name

For any page that you open in this sub-forum, you will see the same title. This will create lot of duplicate title issues. For example, if the number of pages in a sub-forum are 100, then it means that you have 100 duplicate titles in this sub-forum alone.

So this really can create problems for your site: especially, when we are talking about optimizing a site for search engines.

I decided to solve this problem: the solution actually is quite simple.

You only need to make the titles in all pages of the sub-forum unique. And for this, you have to follow these simple steps:

First of all, login to your MyBB admin panel. Then under [Templates], click on [Modify / Delete]. Now under the template that you use “In my case, it was Default Templates” click on [Expand].

In the list which will show up, click on [Forum Display Templates]. Now click on [forumdisplay]. Here you will see code like this:

<html>

<head>

<title>{$mybb->settings['bbname']} - {$foruminfo['name']}</title>

{$headerinclude}

………….

We now have to add few words. Change this line:

<title>{$mybb->settings['bbname']} - {$foruminfo['name']}</title>

To this:

<title>{$mybb->settings['bbname']} - {$foruminfo['name']} - Page $page </title>

What have we added? Only these two words:

Page $page

These two words will now make sure that all the pages in your sub-forums are unique. Now when you will open any page in your sub-forum, the title will look like this:

Forum-Name Forum – Sub-forum-Name – Page 1

Where [Page 1], that is at the end, will change according to the page which is opened.

I hope this will help people who want to make sure that no page in their MyBB Forum has a duplicate title.