Duplicate Title question
-
Thanks Mozzers in advance for any insight into what I'm sure is a basic SEO question.
I'm working with a resort in the great state of Maine. Their home page title reads Maine Resorts, Resorts in Maine, (company name).
The site has about 400 URL's and over half of the URL's utilize the first keyword phrase of the home page title, "Maine Resorts." Predominately, I find them used on the Accommodations pages (pages that describe each room with a picture) which I would label as deeper pages and non-conversion type pages. The page titles themselves are not exact duplicates of the Home Page Title but might read something like "Maine Resorts, Company Name, Accommodation Listing."
My concern is that the heavy use of "Maine Resorts" as the first phrase in over 200 plus pages might be competing against the home page and pulling the home page ranking down.
Thanks for any help given!
-
Thanks guys! Your help is really appreciated. When I took the site over I thought, "man, 200 pages eating into the home page." In some respects this is true but your answers have provided me with a couple ways of fixing this. Fantastic, gotta love MOZ!
-
What you seem to be addressing in your question is the value (or lack thereof) of having the term "Maine Resorts" as the first term in many of the sites titles. As you suspected, there is little value in doing so, but including "Maine Resorts" somewhere (just not at the start) of those titles is not necessarily a bad idea.
What would be more valuable, would be to use that first position for the targeted keyword(s) of that page. So for the "Accommodation Listing" page:
Accommodation Listing, Maine Resorts, [company name]
Think of a user searching for:
accommodation listings for Maine resorts
Now your Google, which of these two pages do you return (if based on title alone)?
- Maine Resorts, [company name], Accommodation Listing
- Accommodation Listing, Maine Resorts, [company name]
So, If you have a homepage that focuses on "Maine Resorts" as a term, than having the term as the first term works in that case:
Maine Resorts, [company name]
Sounds like your titles are already unique, it's just a matter of tweaking them to be more valuable
-
Each page should have a unique title. It is ok to duplicate the site name such as
Contact Us | Maine Resorts
Reservations | Maine Resorts
The title of the page itself should otherwise be unique. It is also ok to have a partial match but the full title should never be duplicated. For example the following titles would not be considered as duplicates:
Cabins
Log Cabins
Cabin Retreats
If any page has the exact title as another page, it would be considered as a duplicate title and should be corrected.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Homepage title on pages/posts title
I want to see the title of the page/post. Right now it is indexing it like page name / homepage name site:forumlist.info Brief info about site
On-Page Optimization | | csfarnsworth
Build in wordpress
SEO Plugin "All in one SEO pack" Settings snapshot are available below http://i.imgur.com/G278Y1Z.png http://imgur.com/gb0YQUO http://imgur.com/fbXQgd1 http://imgur.com/atj3AS4 Anyone can guide me how to fix it?0 -
Alt and title tags on images
For SEO, are alt and title tags still worth the effort? Or have they gone the way of meta keywords? I can see having alt tags for visually impaired reasons, but at this point is there any SEO reason to use them?
On-Page Optimization | | CompucastWeb0 -
Wordpress blog duplicate issue
So after looking at the set up of the blog ive found this. http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/news/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/general/ http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/category/snow/ Content shown on http://www.trespass.co.uk/blog/ can also be found on the other 3 urls. The permalink structure is set up as /%category%/%postname%/ which I want to change to just %postname% Obviously i want to make things as seo friendly as possible so any suggestions to do this right without losing any indexed pages etc. I have limited access to make changes to plugins etc aswell as these need to be done through the development company who manage our site. Cheers Robert
On-Page Optimization | | Trespass0 -
Duplicate Pages software
Hey guys, i was told few hours ago about a system that can take few of your keywords and automatically will create new links and pages (in the map file) for your website, so a website that was build with 20 pages( for example) will be shown to SE as a site with hundreds of pages, thing that should help the SEO IS anyone heard about such a software? is it legal? any advice that you can give on this mater? Thanks i.
On-Page Optimization | | iivgi0 -
How to fix joomla duplicate page titles??
Hello, I have been using seomoz and sh404sef for almost a month now and can't seem to figure out my duplicate page title issue on my joomla site. I have changed everything I thought necessary but no luck. I have one page that I am trying to make dissapear from duplicate page title error and if I can figure it out i'm sure I can use same fix for the other 1,000 duplicate page titles being reported in my seomoz crawl report I have one link that I am working with sef url: http://www.mysite.com/contactus.html I have used sh404sef url manager and added page title, description and keywords to this link and for 3 weeks straight now it still shows that it is duplicate page title in my seomoz crawl report Is there something that I am missing somewhere or did i setup a bad campaign that is looking at wrong things on site? I 've attached image of my sh404sef settings for this link Thanks in advance screenshot1.jpg
On-Page Optimization | | 41global0 -
Does my actual blog post title have any effect once I create a title tag for SEO purposes?
A little confused about this. Reason I ask is that using my actual title for my title tag sometimes isn't the best for getting ranked, so the title and title tag are sometimes not the same.
On-Page Optimization | | seo_f20120 -
Title tags missing
I have noticed that some of my title tags have been altered (by Google?) on the SERP. I am only showing the keywords on some listings, not the full title tags that I wrote, this is happening to our competitors as well. Any idea what is going on, one of my clients is looking for answers! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | USHoleInOne0 -
Potential Duplicate Title Tags On Sibling Pages
Edit I'll take the fall on this one, seems I could have asked my quesiton in a more clear manner. I was cruising other questions and finding a whole of answers that I suspect were not truly intended to help, but maybe help and earn Mozpoints. Wasn't fair of me to label those answering here with that. I will work better on the wording of my questions! 🙂 Edit Either I am asking my question poorly or I am learning there may be a rush to get points by throwing up any old answer...it very well may be the former which I am open to feedback on. Each page is to stand alone and hopefully rank well for the neighbourhood name and in conjunction with another relevant keyword phrase. There is no 'duplicate' version of any pages. * On a site there are numerous pages that provide real estate listings broken down by neighbourhood. Each containing similar content, a abbreviated version of the listings, often spanning 2 or 3 pages. These are 3rd level pages. Properties->Calgary Neighbourhoods->Evanston The title tags created are: Evanston Homes For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Panorama Hills Home For Sale - NW Calgary Real Estate Etc. for about 15 or so pages. Then they start again for another area of the city: Sagewood Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate Woodside Homes For Sale - Airdrie Real Estate At this point there is no text on the actual page outside of the listings...an example of similar listings on another site - http://www.experiencerealtygroup.com/BaturynandDunluceHomes.ubr Do you think the SE's will see these as 'proper' use of the Title Tag or duplicate or other practices they tend to frown upon? It is a logical way of creating the title and obviously creating a unique version for each page would not only be tough to scale on some sites with 100's of these pages, they would become a little silly and not much use to the searcher in the SERPs Thanks for any help!
On-Page Optimization | | kyegrace1