Are duplicate titles an issue for pages I don't need ranking for?
-
A client has a load of duplicate page titles on their site. However, to cut a long story short, most of these pages are pointless and therefore we don't need ranking for them.
As such, I'm not concerned whether any of the pages with duplicate content on them are ranked or not..... unless having duplicate page titles / content on these pages could mean that other pages on the site, like the homepage, don't rank as high because of this.
Do I need to worry about duplicate titles on these pages, or can I ignore duplicate content on pages that I don't want to be ranked?
Hope that makes sense!
-
Hi,
If these are pages that you "don't want to be ranked" then you should add meta "noindex" tag to them immediately so that they are removed from the index and will not be added with new crawls.
As evidenced by your own question, they are pages you don't care about. That means you have no reason to make them great pages. This said, leaving them available for indexing is a "panda slap" waiting to happen.
I would treat the "noindex" as a priority.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
Duplicate content on individual pages will affect your entire site. My advice: fix it. Finding a solution is possibly more simple than you might assume. At the very least, automate a title edit that provides unique titles that have relevant keywords insterted in the title string.
There is an endless assortment of articles that describe this very phenomenon, thanks to Google's Panda update(s).
Google doesn't share it's algorithm details, but there's enough observed and documented cause/effect regarding this issue to put this on your priority list.
That said, if you didn't see a drop in rankings through Panda, your duplicate to unique content ratio is probably good enough for this to drop down your list of priorities, but not off.
Looking forward to hearing about your course of action. Good luck.
-
We have clients that advertise identical properties on a complex, we train them to create unique titles for each apartment and to tweak the description so that it reads differently. The content is based on the unique title which will be a searchable phrase. i.e. 2 bedroom apartment in portugal. Next property will be apartment in portugal with two bedrooms.
As this are exact searches by creating 20 properties all with different search terms we maximise the exposure for the website, as it is very easy to get the no.1 spot on such an exact search.
-
Thanks all. I do already have webmaster tools and I'm about to hit their developers with some pretty bad news - hence why I'm asking if this is absolutely essential!
The site is for a relatively large online retailer and it's just a mess really. I think this is happening is because they have a load of include files in the top level folder, and therefore Google is reading these as individual URLs.
Is there a reason why Google punishes the entire site rather than just the related pages? I understand they have quality control but this site gets several hundred thousand monthly visits, it's been around since 1998 and has decent Page Rank. Surely that would override what is essentially poor housekeeping? (obviously not!)
Thanks for your time and input, appreciate your help.
-
Duplicate titles or duplicate content?
Duplicate titles are a small problem while duplicate content is a larger one. You should avoid both in an ideal world. Duplicate content should be removed via 301 redirect or sorted using Canonical http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Duplicate titles won't help you but Google doesn't discount pages with the same title tag, provided the content is different.Duplicate titles can impact clickability of your result, tho. Let's say your titles are all "Blue Widgets!", but you also sell brown, black and teal widgets. Even if you get a page to rank well for "teal widgets", the page title says it's "Blue Widgets" and people might not click on it, thinking Google made a mistake. Yes, Google will highlight the content it thinks is relevant to your search, but your title tag is what they will click on.
-
Yea it's a major ranking factor so get them changed and unique otherwide the pages you want to be ranked for may be discredited
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
-
Losing Page Rank
Hello Moz I launched a re-design of our site over the summer and we jumped in organic search for some keywords. Recently one of our landing pages is being hammered by Google last we we lost one position this week we lost 5 positions. Although, when I check the on-page grade Moz gives it an A is there a check sheet anyone has that I could go through to see if I have any common problems. Ryan
On-Page Optimization | | ryanparrish0 -
Page 2 is ranking
Hey All, I'm working on a wordpress site project and in analytics the sites ranking url is page 2. is this a problem?
On-Page Optimization | | CobraJones950 -
Competitor's 'hidden' links harming my site?
Hi everyone, I'm new to both Moz & seo, and am attempting to tackle our site's issues after being hit by panda / penguin, so would be grateful for any advice offered. I bought a website 3 years ago after the previous company that ran it went into administration. Having bought the website, it became apparent that the employees of the previous company had copied the entire site content, and relaunched it with a new look / brand. Over the last 3 years they've rewritten much of the content, but there remains a lot of links from their site back to ours which have had the anchor text stripped out, and point to images on our site which have since been removed, example below... <a href="http://www.MyCompany.com/catalog/images/filename.pdf" target="<a class="attribute-value">_blank</a>"><strong>strong>a> What I'm trying to understand is whether the 404 errors being returned by the broken links, and the presence of 'hidden' links on their site, is likely to reflect badly on our site or theirs? I'm not interested in outing anyone here, and I realise the standard recommendation for these kinds of situations is to write to the company telling them to remove the offending content, but if at all possible I'd prefer to fix our site by improving content & links etc, rather than 'force' them to take action and inadvertently improve their own site's content / rankings. As I say, all advice gratefully received 🙂
On-Page Optimization | | Sandy_M0 -
Wrong Page is Ranking
My client is an Ecommerce reseller of a few major scooter brands. We currently rank fifth for a particular brand name but our main brand page isn't the one that ranks. Instead, it's a product page. The main brand page has an A rating from Moz for the desired keyword phrases. Neither page has any backlinks. Any ideas on why our main brand page would be outranked by a product page? What could we do to change this?
On-Page Optimization | | TrinShin0 -
Why aren't our articles ranking in Google?
We have a website promoting Pakistani lawyers online. The website also has an articles section where we post articles reviewing different legal cases and laws. All of our articles are written by actual lawyers are high quality and unique. Website itself doesn't have large page/site authority but its not a baby website either. I can't figure out why our articles don't rank on Google. Here are few of the articles:
On-Page Optimization | | Heydarian
http://www.pakistanilawyers.com/articles/pakistan-child-custody-laws-explained-479/
http://www.pakistanilawyers.com/articles/pakistan-divorce-law-476/
http://www.pakistanilawyers.com/articles/pakistani-law-insolvency-guide-460/ I don't know whether its simply because there are not enough links pointing to our website or if there is a problem in the website itself that i can't find. Thanks for the help0 -
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 -
How google handle with Title when is invisible on the page?
I would like to display H1 Title tag invisible on the homepage. I set up Title colour same colour as background colour. How google handle with this cloaking? What should I to set up in the style.css?
On-Page Optimization | | joeko0 -
Do I need a Meta description for every page?
HI Guys, We have just developed a new website and I'm looking to add meta descriptions with relevant key words to the pages . As the site has over 80 pages it is quite an undertaking and i was wandering if pages, such as the shopping cart and FAQ's etc, need meta descriptions as well? Thanks in advance : ) Pete
On-Page Optimization | | dawsonski0