Duplicate URL issue on phpBB forum affecting Google indexing

[thegioiluatsu]

Hello everyone,

I'm encountering an issue related to Google indexing when using the phpBB platform for my forum. Currently, the same post can be accessed through multiple different URLs, for example:

This article of mine has up to 3 urls indexed by Google.

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https://diendan.hocluat.vn/viewtopic.php?t=11027
https://diendan.hocluat.vn/viewtopic.php?p=13276
https://diendan.hocluat.vn/viewtopic.php?f=42&t=11027&p=13276

This is causing Google to index these URLs as separate pages, leading to duplicate content issues, which might negatively impact the SEO of the forum.

I would like to ask if there's a way to resolve this issue? Is it possible to configure phpBB so that only one URL is used and indexed? If there's any extension or setting to optimize this, I would greatly appreciate your guidance.

Thank you all!

[thecoalman]

phpBB uses canonical url in the the head tag, if you check each of those URL's it's set to.

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<link rel="canonical" href="https://diendan.hocluat.vn/viewtopic.php?t=11027">

The purpose of that is so search engine knows it's duplicate content. Why they would all be showing up in search results you'll need to ask Google.

What you can do is use robots.txt to block those links with parameters like p= using wildcard.

https://developers.google.com/search/do ... robots_txt