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
-
For an e-commerce product category page that has several funnels to specific products, for SEO purposes does it matter whether the category page's overview content is above or below those funnels?
We manage an e-commerce site. On a category page, there are several funnels to specific products. We moved the category overview content below those funnels to make it easier for users to quickly get to products. Seems more user friendly to me, but could that move of the main content to the lower part of the page be a negative ranking factor?
On-Page Optimization | | PKI_Niles0 -
Hello, I've heard that the outbound links I provide in my content should have a high degree of relevancy to the topic I'm writing about or they aren't really worth including. Is this true?
Hello, I've heard that relevancy of the content between the source page and the target page of outbound links in my content matters greatly. The outbound links I provide in my content should have a high degree of relevancy to the topic I'm writing about, or they aren't really worth including. Example: Don't just link to the homepage of an organization mentioned in the article, link to a page on their site that is related to the topic you are writing about. Is this true? Would including less relevant links negatively impact SEO in any way?
On-Page Optimization | | DJBKBU0 -
How to optimize WordPress Pages with Duplicate Page Content?
I found the non WWW ans WWW duplicate pages URL only, more than thousand pages.
On-Page Optimization | | eigital0 -
Will Google Custom Search results on my home page kill it's ranking?
This is probably a dumb question, but here goes anyway. 🙂 On a site I have it would be very useful to the reader to offer a search box that uses a Google Custom Search that I have optimized to search websites that are closely on-topic with my site. I know it sounds bad that I would send people to other sites, but just assume that the reasons are valid for this discussion. My question is, if the search results are set to display on the same page (the home page) as the search box, will the links in the search results to external sites just bleed my page rank to death? I assume it would, but thought I'd check just in case I'm missing something. I have to option to place the results on separate page of my site, and noindex it, but it won't be as powerful as it would be on the home page.
On-Page Optimization | | bizzer0 -
Meta Title for Category Pages
I am trying to improve the SEO for a few key category pages on my blog. I have two ranking really well so I want to boost them and bring up some others. Can I put two keywords in the meta title? Example: Maternity Deals | Pregnancy Deals Or should I just stick with one? Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | dealblogger0 -
Duplicate Content - Deleting Pages
The Penguin update in April 2012 caused my website to lose about 70% of its traffic overnight and as a consequence, the same in volume of sales. Almost a year later I am stil trying to figure out what the problem is with my site. As with many ecommerce sites a large number of the product pages are quite similar. My first crawl with SEOMOZ identified a large number of pages that are very similar - the majority of these are in a category that doesn't sell well anyway and so to help with the problem I am thinking of removing one of my categories (about 1000 products). My question is - would removing all these links boost the overall SEO of the site since I am removing a large chunk of near-duplicate links? Also - if I do remove all these links would I have to put in place a 301 redirect for every single page and if so, what's the quickest way of doing this. My site is www.modern-canvas-art.com Robin
On-Page Optimization | | robbowebbo0 -
How do I get rid of duplicate page titles when using a php site?
Hi. I have an e-commerce site that sells a list of products. The list is divided into categories and then those categories for the various pages on the site. An example of a page title. would be given root/products.php?c=40 another page would be given root/products.php?c=41 Is there a way to structure the site with SEO in mind?
On-Page Optimization | | curtisgibbsiii0 -
Duplicate Page Titles?
I'm running a campaign report within SEOmoz & am getting 9 pages that appear on this report. They all happen to be our author pages www.example.com//author/admin We have multiple authors. Is there a proper way that I should take care of this? Also as a side note, I'm using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, is there a setting on their I should change that will fix this issue? Or is it an issue at all? Thanks, BJ
On-Page Optimization | | seointern0