New Webmaster Tools suggests Google disdain for phpBB forums?

[serengeti]

Wish there were a way for google to see phpbb forums distinctly from the actual site. According to the new webmaster tools interface, my phpbb forums are giving me some duplicate title tag errors, lot of messy results for internal links due to forum posts, unwanted results for most frequent words in my site (e.g., "post" and "posts") etc... All this because of having phpbb forums and not knowing how to make google look at them separately from my site.

Would a site possibly rank significantly higher if phpbb forums were removed?

[bwnbwn]

serengeti being under the main domain name makes it part of the site easy thing to do is make it a subdomain/domain name on it's own then you won't have this issue

[serengeti]

So if my site is www.xyz.com, and the forums are currently at www.xyz.com/forums, I should have them at say www.forums.xyz.com?

Also, some of the sections of the forums are ranked highly by google for niche keywords, so I guess I want a bit of both -- the benefit of forums boosting ranking, but not the problems associated with keywords and internal links in each post. Maybe that is not easily possible.

[LifeinAsia]

I should have them at say www.forums.xyz.com

Most people would use just forums.xyz.com

[Receptional Andy]

All this because of having phpbb forums and not knowing how to make google look at them separately from my site

To me, it doesn't sound like this is the issue at all. Cleaning up the display in Webmaster Tools isn't really the problem ;)

It sounds to me like you have poorly optimised forums - you should perhaps looking around for any specifics on tidying that up, and I would certainly advise that before you start switching to subdomains or something similar. It looks like quite a few other members use the software, incidentally:

[google.com...]

[Swanny007]

I've been running phpbb forums for over 8 years now. The duplicate URL issues have been a bit of an issue, but Google handles things way better now than they used to.

Personally I think it's better to leave the forums wherever they are and tell Google to not index the duplicate URLs. Keep it simple.

Here's a snippet from my robots.txt file to help block duplicate URLs and unimportant files as part of phpbb's install.

Disallow: /forums/faq.php
Disallow: /forums/groupcp.php
Disallow: /forums/login.php
Disallow: /forums/memberlist.php
Disallow: /forums/modcp.php
Disallow: /forums/posting.php
Disallow: /forums/privmsg.php
Disallow: /forums/viewonline.php
Disallow: /forums/*view=previous$
Disallow: /forums/*view=next$
Disallow: /forums/*start*
Disallow: /forums/viewtopic.php*p*