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
-
SEO Title Length
Hi Everyone. I have a few pages being flagged with "Title Too Long". However, these are page 2, page 3, page 4, etc of category pages. They obviously have "| Page x of x" at the end of the title. Can these be ignored or is there a more SEO friendly way of handling this issue? Thanks. Michael
Technical SEO | | nomad_blogger0 -
Duplicate content
Hello mozzers, I have an unusual question. I've created a page that I am fully aware that it is near 100% duplicate content. It quotes the law, so it's not changeable. The page is very linkable in my niche. Is there a way I can build quality links to it that benefit my overall websites DA (i'm not bothered about the linkable page being ranked) without risking panda/dupe content issues? Thanks, Peter
Technical SEO | | peterm21 -
Duplicate Page Title for a Large Listing Website
My company has a popular website that has over 4,000 crawl errors showing in Moz, most of them coming up as Duplicate Page Title. These duplicate page titles are coming from pages with the title being the keyword, then location, such as: "main keyword" North Carolina
Technical SEO | | StorageUnitAuctionList
"main keyword" Texas ... and so forth. These pages are ranked and get a lot of traffic. I was wondering what the best solution is for resolving these types of crawl errors without it effecting our rankings. Thanks!0 -
Wordpress: Tags generate duplicate Content - just delete the tags!?
Asking people, they say tags are bad and spamy and as I can see they generate all my duplicate page content issues. So the big question is, why Google very often prefers to show in SERPS these Tag-URLS... so it can't be too bad! :)))? Then after some research I found the "Term Optimizer" on Yoast.com ... that should help exactly with this problem but it seems not to be available anymore? So may be there another plugin that can help... or just delete all tags from my blog? and install permanent redirects?
Technical SEO | | inlinear
Is this the solution?0 -
Duplicate Title Tags
Hi, Are these 2 title tags different enough? Notice only the 's' on Templates is switched <colgroup><col width="559"></colgroup>
Technical SEO | | Studio33
| Invoice Templates | Invoice Template | invoicing Software | Invoice Software Invoice Template | Invoice Templates | invoicing Software | Invoice Software | Thanks0 -
Filter Tag Duplicate Content E-Commerce Issue
Hello, I just launched a new site for a client but am seeing some duplicate content issues in the campaign crawl. It has to do with the drill-down, filter "tags" that helps users find the product they are looking for. You can see them in the sidebar here: http://www.ssmd.com/shop/ In my crawl report this is what is showing up as duplicate content (attached image). How do I keep these widgets from generating duplicate content on the site? Also, not sure if it's important or not, but I am using Wordpress, WooCommerce and Yoast's SEO Tool. Any suggestions are appreciated! Screen%20Shot%202012-10-23%20at%202.56.00%20PM.png
Technical SEO | | kylehungate0 -
Duplicate content issue
Hi everyone, I have an issue determining what type of duplicate content I have. www.example.com/index.php?mact=Calendar,m57663,default,1&m57663return_id=116&m57663detailpage=&m57663year=2011&m57663month=6&m57663day=19&m57663display=list&m57663return_link=1&m57663detail=1&m57663lang=en_GB&m57663returnid=116&page=116 Since I am not an coding expert, to me it looks like it is a URL parameter duplicate content. Is it? At the same time "return_id" would makes me think it is a session id duplicate content. I am confused about how to determine different types of duplicate content, even by reading articles on Seomoz about it: http://www.seomoz.org/learn-seo/duplicate-content. Could someone help me on how to recognize different types of duplicate content? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | Ideas-Money-Art0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001