Duplicate keyphrases in page titles = penalty?
-
Hello Mozzers - just looking at a website which has duplicate keyphrases in its page titles...
So you have [keyphrase 1] | [exact match Keyphrase 1]
Now I happen to know this particular site has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic - the SEO agency working on the site had advised the client to duplicate keyphrases. Hard to believe, huh!
What I'm wondering is whether this extensive exact match keyphrase duplication might've been enough to attract a penalty? Your thoughts would be welcome.
-
That's an interesting thought Luke. Yes, I agree something like that would work much better. I think a group like that would need some strong affiliations with already recognised online groups of like-minded SEO people (like on Moz) to give it gravity and value, but it could work. I don't know if such a group exists.
Peter
-
Hi Peter - you make some good points.
Perhaps something like you have in public relations - perhaps you join an institute (or a new branch of Moz) by paying a fee and signing up to a code of conduct - if a client is unhappy with your conduct, they can lodge a complaint and challenge your position as a member of the said organisation. That would be a great way forward and restore some level of trust in the industry. A kind of self-regulation if you like.
-
An interesting thought but I'm not sure the industry should be regulated.
My experience when governments get involved is that they then start implementing laws and rules without really understanding the industry. This happened around 18 months ago when the EU implemented the 'cookie law', a rule to outlaw bad practice that made it harder for sites to make their pages easy to navigate and engage with and harder for users to browse the web.
In a sense, the changes Google has made to its algorithms over time have acted as a regulator. If you don't follow good practice then you will end up losing. There's lots of companies out there not just in the SEO world delivering poor, unregulated service. But SEO agencies who continue with bad practice will soon lose reputation and go out of business.
Anyway, all the best to you,
Peter -
Which is the case, unfortunately. Just auditing the backlinks. Gulp. I really do think SEO industry needs to be regulated in some way. There's just so much dubious stuff going on.
-
Yes, very odd that an SEO agency should do this.
It's a dumb tactic, but I doubt it would confer a penalty. More like downgrade the quality of the page and cause it to drop but I would be surprised if this alone would be responsible for the site you mention to suffer a dramatic fall in traffic.
If, as you say, the SEO agency was responsible for doing this, then it's likely that the same agency would have also been responsible for other dumb to verging on spammy tactics on this site with the cumulative result being a significant drop.
Peter
-
In this case I'm seeing titles like this - they're doubled up on the same page:
vacations in Florida | vacations in Florida
No duplication between pages - just the doubling up of keyphrases on each page. Very odd indeed! SEO agency concerned had actually put this in place for client.
-
Yes I agree with Chris. There are thousands of sites with duplicate page Titles. They would be typically be sites which have not been optimised at all where the company service and company name are duplicated on every page as a default setting.
I doubt whether Google pays attention to that in terms of the site trying to manipulate search results. If anything they are undermining the search performance of their site themselves by making it harder for search engines to understand the focus of each page. That an SEO company advised them to do this is the most surprising.
Peter
-
Luke,
It's unlikely that would be be enough to incur a penalty. Not that revising those title might not help but typically, that would be more along the lines of poor optimization rather than outright spam.
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
-
Google is indexing wrong page for search terms not on that page
I’m having a problem … the wrong page is indexing with Google, for search phrases “not on that page”. Explained … On a website I developed, I have four products. For example sake, we’ll say these four products are: Sneakers (search phrase: sneakers) Boots (search phrase: boots) Sandals (search phrase: sandals) High heels (search phrase: high heels) Error: What is going “wrong” is … When the search phrase “high heels” is indexed by Google, my “Sneakers” page is being indexed instead (and ranking very well, like #2). The page that SHOULD be indexing, is the “High heels” page (not the sneakers page – this is the wrong search phrase, and it’s not even on that product page – not in URL, not in H1 tags, not in title, not in page text – nowhere, except for in the top navigation link). Clue #1 … this same error is ALSO happening for my other search phrases, in exactly the same manner. i.e. … the search phrase “sandals” is ALSO resulting in my “Sneakers” page being indexed, by Google. Clue #2 … this error is NOT happening with Bing (the proper pages are correctly indexing with the proper search phrases, in Bing). Note 1: MOZ has given all my product pages an “A” ranking, for optimization. Note 2: This is a WordPress website. Note 3: I had recently migrated (3 months ago) most of this new website’s page content (but not the “Sneakers” page – this page is new) from an old, existing website (not mine), which had been indexing OK for these search phrases. Note 4: 301 redirects were used, for all of the OLD website pages, to the new website. I have tried everything I can think of to fix this, over a period of more than 30 days. Nothing has worked. I think the “clues” (it indexes properly in Bing) are useful, but I need help. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MG_Lomb_SEO0 -
One page ranking for all key words, when other targeted pages not ranking
Hi everyone I am fairly new to SEO but have a basic understanding. I have a page that has a lot of content on it (including brand names and product types and relevant info) ranking for a quite a few key words. This is cool, except that I have pages dedicated to each specific key word that are not ranking. The more specific page still has a lot of relevant text on it too. eg. TYRES page - Ranks first for "Tyres". Ranks okay for many tyre key words, including "truck tyres"
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JDadd
TRUCK TYRES page - not ranking for "truck tyres" Further on, I then have pages not ranking all that well for more specific key words when they should. eg HONDA TRUCK TYRES - Then has a page full of product listings - no actual text. Not Ranking for "honda truck tyres". ABC HONDA TRUCK TYRE - not ranking for "abc honda truck tyre" key word
These pages don't have a lot of content on them, as essentially every single tyre is the same except for the name. But they do have text. So sometimes, these terms don't rank at all. And sometimes, the first TYRES page ranks for it. I have done the basic on page seo for all these pages (hopefully properly) including meta desc, meta titles, H1, H2, using key words in text, alt texting images where possible etc. According to MOZ they are optimised in the 90%. Link building is difficult as they are product listings, so other sites don't really link to these pages. Has anyone got ideas on why the top TYRES page might be so successful and out ranking more specific pages? Any ideas on how I can get the other pages ranking higher as they are more relevant to the search term? We are looking in to a website redesign/overhaul so any advice on how I can prevent this from happening on essentially a new site would be great too. Thanks!0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
Duplicate Page Content Errors on Moz Crawl Report
Hi All, I seem to be losing a 'firefighting' battle with regards to various errors being reported on the Moz crawl report relating to; Duplicate Page Content Missing Page Title Missing Meta Duplicate Page Title While I acknowledge that some of the errors are valid (and we are working through them), I find some of them difficult to understand... Here is an example of a 'duplicate page content' error being reported; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com (which is obviously our homepage) Is reported to have 'duplicate page content' compared with the following pages; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/guides/gratuities http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/cruise-line-deals/holland-america-2014-offers/?order_by=brochure_lead_difference http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/about-us/meet-the-team/craig All 3 of those pages are completely different hence my confusion... This is just a solitary example, there are many more! I would be most interested to hear what people's opinions are... Many thanks Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomKing0 -
Duplicate titles and descriptions problem?
We had an old site that used the urls for items site.com/32423432 we changed that to site.com/item name The old stuff has gone away and we have 301 redirects up. For some reason we are getting hit with duplicate titles on those pages and duplicate meta tags. The site relaunch was in November and we have a had a few problems but this just started showing up in the last week after having gone down. Any thoughts on a fix?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EcommerceSite0 -
Dynamic pages - ecommerce product pages
Hi guys, Before I dive into my question, let me give you some background.. I manage an ecommerce site and we're got thousands of product pages. The pages contain dynamic blocks and information in these blocks are fed by another system. So in a nutshell, our product team enters the data in a software and boom, the information is generated in these page blocks. But that's not all, these pages then redirect to a duplicate version with a custom URL. This is cached and this is what the end user sees. This was done to speed up load, rather than the system generate a dynamic page on the fly, the cache page is loaded and the user sees it super fast. Another benefit happened as well, after going live with the cached pages, they started getting indexed and ranking in Google. The problem is that, the redirect to the duplicate cached page isn't a permanent one, it's a meta refresh, a 302 that happens in a second. So yeah, I've got 302s kicking about. The development team can set up 301 but then there won't be any caching, pages will just load dynamically. Google records pages that are cached but does it cache a dynamic page though? Without a cached page, I'm wondering if I would drop in traffic. The view source might just show a list of dynamic blocks, no content! How would you tackle this? I've already setup canonical tags on the cached pages but removing cache.. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Bio-RadAbs0 -
Duplicate page titles and brand name
Duplicate page titles and brand name. According to SEOMOZ in my one of web site .there are many duplicate title tags some of them are company names .my problem is Do i need to make unique tile tags for each pages with keywords and what about putting company name in each page. 2)Is it necessary to put company name (Brand name ) in each page.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
High number of items per page or low number with more category pages?
In SEO terms, what would be the best method: High number of items per page or low number with more pages? For example, this category listing here: http://flyawaysimulation.com/downloads/90/fsx-civil-aircraft/ It has 10 items per page. Would there be any benefit of changing a listing like that to 20 items in order to decrease the number of pages in the category? Also, what other ways could you increase the SEO of category listings like that?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Peter2640