SEO problem: Duplicate content in tags pages (vB3 BUG)
 

It seems that tag pages lack of a check for navigation like forumdisplay and showthread pages have. This generates a lot of duplicate content which could penalize forums in Google and other search engines:

For example check this page for london tag, as you can see the latest page is 10.
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/tags.p...london&page=10

However if you manually edit the number you can generate lot of other pages which will have the same content as page 10:
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/tags.p...london&page=50

I have seen Google indexing tons of pages with the same content like this.

It seems that vB4 have fixed this issue, because i can't replicate this, instead i get a
"Sorry - no matches. Please try some different terms", but i couldn't find a way to port this.

I have been thinking on creating a <link rel="canonical"> tag for these pages however i'm not sure how i can handle this with hooks in tag pages.

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

Thanks

I use robots.txt to block tags from being crawled. I do not believe them to be seo friendly any more. I don't think any list of keywords is any good any more at least for Google seo.

I believe the tags system was mainly designed for use inside the site, not seo.

Lastly, I know you catch this stuff on GWT but I really think Google's current algo is smart enough to know the difference with this type of duplicate content. I doubt you would be "penalized" for it.