Negative Effect of Duplicate Title Tags
-
Hi guys,
I'm trying to figure out if one my problems with search rankings might be a result of 2 of my main pages (home page and tier 2 page linked to main menu) have the same title and description tags.
Let's say my keyword is 'building paper airplanes'. The url for my homepage is http://domain.com and the Title Tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".
My tier 2 page url is http://domain.com/building-paper-airplanes and the Title tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".
The home page is more of an introduction page before the user gets into the instructions on the tier 2 page.
Can anybody advise if this might be having a negative affect on my search results for the search term 'building paper airplanes'?
Thanks.
-
Not sure if this is the reason why your pages are not ranking. I am working on a project where it has over 30 duplicate title tags and those pages rank well 1-10 for about 20 pages.
The domain is really old. Registered since 1997. The website is just as old.
-
Hi Guys,
Same Question here.
I seem to have about 8k duplicate page titles.
Reason being is we have listings of cars about 10k plus cars so a lot of them have duplicate names. like Camry 2013 , so what happens is i wanted to know if that could have an effect on my ranking;. and if there is any way to address such thing on word-press , like a plugin or something.
-
Hi Justin,
That makes sense - the duplicate content issue is one I'm assessing on the site at the moment as a result of our use of an SSL cert. We have our homepage under a SSL (https://) and other content on the site is on a regular http://. As a result, I think we may be suffering from some duplicate content in relation to this - when you click on a tier 2 page link from our homepage there is a 302 redirect that brings you from https://domain.com/page2 to http://domain.com/page2.
All stuff that I thought would have been address during development, but the SEO beast needs a lot more attention than initially thought!
Thanks for the help though, and the SEOMoz community have been really great in answering a number of questions so far. Lots of great info.
Cheers.
-
Nice! Good to hear. Once you segment the those keyword you should see a boost. In regards to the trailing slash.
in most cases domain.com/test will also render at domain.com/test/, the root domain is not as big of a deal, but when you get into the sub folders is when you start to have issues. You will also want to keep an eye on domain.com/test/, domain.com/test/index.html and any other variations that might load the same content. These will all look like duplicate content to the engines.
Let me know if this helps. Otherwise I can send you some examples.
-
Thanks Kevin.
We currently do show up on Page 1 search results for both of these pages, but we haven't been able to get above 6th position for either (we normally get the pages listed on 7th & 8th position), which is why I'm looking into the issue.
Without any knowledge, it struck me that we might be hurting ourselves (or rather, hurting the ranking of one of the pages) by having both pages tagged with the same Title tags and keywords.
I know there are a huge number of factors involved and I'm trying to evaluate why we are not increasing in rankings (especially as I can see that we have far superior backlink juice than our competitors).
Cheers.
-
Thanks Justin - good points.
We do plan on segmenting the keywords for these pages in order to show up for more terms in search. It isn't segmented at the moment and I'm trying to figure out if the duplication could actually be negatively affecting our results in search.
Regarding the training slash in the URL: could you explain a little bit more about what to look out for here. Some more info from our side: when we show up in search, our domain is listed in google as http://domain.com/. However, when you arrive at our site, the url is https://domain.com
Cheers
-
Perhaps the bigger question is: why are you not segmenting your keywords for these pages?
I sounds like you do have duplicate tagging and are not utilizing the additional content to target additional terms. If you leverage the hierarchy of content, cross link, and tag appropriately you will avoid any negative affects.
Anther thing to look at as well, is the trailing slash on the URL. This is often overlooked and could cause even more duplicate content.
-
Definitely could. Always have unique page titles/meta descriptions. If they KW is long tail, you could possible get these on the same page. If the title/description is the same, your ctr will suffer as most visitors will not click a second link with the same info.
Google is all about original content and anything you can do to make the content fresh and different will help Google, you and your visitors.
Why don't you call the first one "Introduction to Building Paper Airplanes" & "Advance Building Paper Airplanes" or something like that?
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
-
Hreflang Tags - error: 'en' - no return tags
Hello, We have recently implemented Hreflang tags to improve the findability of our content in each specific language. However, Webmaster tool is giving us this error... Does anyone know what it means and how to solve it? Here I attach a screenshot: http://screencast.com/t/a4AsqLNtF6J Thanks for your help!
Technical SEO | | Kilgray0 -
Sitemap duplicate title
At the moment we have a html sitemap which is pulling the same h1's/ titles. How big a problem is the duplicate content issue which is medium priority in the moz pro softaware? Would you recommend changes as sitemap page 1 - page 2 etc. Thanks
Technical SEO | | VUK-SEO0 -
Webmaster > HTML Improvements > Duplicate title tags
Hi, Webmaster > HTML Improvements > Duplicate title tags shows as in screenshot. How can i set this right as its a single page which duplicates? http://imgur.com/mjB0xZS Regards
Technical SEO | | mtthompsons0 -
Does incomplete or private WHOIS information have negative effect on SEO?
I wondered if having incomplete WHOIS information has a negative effect on rankings? Also I know it's possible to keep WHOIS information private, so I wondered if google would think this suspicious and rank a site not as highly as it should? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Silktide0 -
What's the latest on Title Tags?
What is the latest on what Google is looking for? Keyword one, Keyword two? Sentences with the Keyword in them?
Technical SEO | | netviper0 -
Help with duplicate title tags.
Hi Just going through Seomoz crawl diagnostics for one of my clients sites & see that the title tags for over 2,000 pages are the same due to the way there site software generates the titles using php, examples : **home page** = <title>Home - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> other page = <title>A0 Frames - Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discounttitle> So as you can see the page titles have the page name given to the beginning of the title which is fine as they have the keyword, then the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount Now if i take out the text : Trade prices,Next Day Delivery,Bulk Discount the home page is going to have just the word Home which is rubbish & the other pages will have the keyword which is better but not great, just wondered if any one has a better solution?.
Technical SEO | | askshopper0 -
Duplicate title tag error
Hi all, I am new to SEO, and we have just launched a new version of our site (kept the domain name the same though). I keep getting errors for duplicate title tags - e.g. www.sandafayre.com/default.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/Default.aspx, www.sandafayre.com/StampAuctions.aspx and www.sandafayre.com/stampauctions.aspx (plus loads others :o). The only difference each time seems to be the capitalisation of the first character - but I though URLs were not case sensitive? I've been advised to add the rel canonical tag to one of the pages, but the problem is I really only have 1 version of each page! Can anybody help please? Many thanks in advance! Nikki
Technical SEO | | Stampy780 -
How to resolve duplicate content and title errors?
Hello, I'm new to this resource and SEO. I have taken the time to read other posts but am not entirely sure about the best way to resolve the issues I am experiencing and so am hoping for a helpful hand. My site diagnostics advise me that most of my errors relate to duplicate content and duplicate page titles. Most of these errors seem to relate to our ecommerce product pages. A little about us first, we manufacture and retail over the internet our own line of unique products which can only be purchased through our website. So it’s not so important to make our product pages stand out from competitors. An example of one of our product pages can be found here: http://www.nabru.co.uk/product/Sui+2X2+Corner+Sofa In terms of SEO we are focusing on improving the rankings of our category pages which compete much more with our competitors, but would also like our product pages to be found via a google search for those potential customers that are at the late stage of a buying cycle. So my question: Whilst it would be good to add more content to the product pages, user reviews, individual product descriptions etc (and have good intentions to do this over time, which unfortunately is limited) is there an easy way to fix the duplicate content issues, ensure our products can be found and ensure that the main focus is on our category pages? Many thanks.
Technical SEO | | jannkuzel0