Duplicate keyphrases in page titles = penalty?

[McTaggart]

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.

[crackingmedia]

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

[McTaggart]

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.

[crackingmedia]

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

[McTaggart]

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.

[crackingmedia]

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

[McTaggart]

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.

[crackingmedia]

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

[Chris.Menke]

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.