Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate titles from hreflang variations
-
Hi,
I am working on a large global site which has around 9 different language variations.
We have setup the hreflang tags and referenced the corresponding content as follows:
(We have not implemented a version X-default reference, as we felt it was not necessary)
Using DeepCrawl and Search Console, we can see that these language variations are causing duplicate title issues. Many of them.
My assumption was that the hreflang would have alleviated this issue and informed Google what is going on, however i wanted to see if anyone has any experience with this kind of thing before.
It would be good to understand what the best practice approach is to deal with the problem.
Is it even an issue at all, or just the tools being over-sensitive?
Thank you in advance.
-
Aha I see! That makes some sense. If the products are 'branded' and therefore the name never changes in any language, you have two options
Let's imagine you are selling a branded air conditioning unit, with the made-up name of GreenAir (maybe it's more economical and uses less electricity, thus the name from the 'green movement')
You could just leave it duplicate:
- EN: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions
- FR: GreenAir | GreenWave Solutions
Or you could add more contextual info, which would be better:
- EN: GreenAir Environmental Air Conditioning Unit | GreenWave
- FR: GreenAir Unité de Climatisation Environnementale | GreenWave
I know, I know - my French sucks (actually that's from Google Translate). But still, you can see that - you could add more in there. The hurdle for you will be, what is required in terms of costs to deploy to that level of complexity?
From a straight-up SEO POV, I stand by my preference. But once mass translation work is factored and targeted, dev-based implementation... you may feel otherwise!
-
Hi,
Thank you for taking the time to respond.
I would tend to agree with your point that the title tags should be written in the necessary language, however the the duplicate title tags are all branded products with heritage and reputation, which will not change no matter what the language is.
What are your thoughts on this?
Nick
-
I think it is an issue because, people browsing your site in other languages will have the wrong language title displayed in their browser tabs if they are multi-tab browsing! The title tag is still one of the important ones for SEO, nothing has really come along to replace it
A businesses' ambitions in terms of an international roll-out, are to break into new (foreign) international query-spaces and get extra traffic (especially from Google, or leading search engines in other nations like Yandex and Baidu). Google's ambitions (when adding your international pages to their index) are that their audience can break onto other areas of the web which (due to the language barrier) were previously closed to them. But they want your content to then be 'tailored' to their international audiences, traffic which Google has no obligation to send your way. Google wants good UX for their searchers, so that Google remains top-dog in the search world
The less tailored your international roll-out is, the more shallow it is (with more pieces missing), the less confident Google will be. They will be less confident that sending their users to you will result in positive search-sentiment
Every piece of the jigsaw which you are missing, counts against you. It makes your international roll-out look more like a quick Google-translate powered land-grab, and less like an authentic international roll-out
My question to you is, when you identify a bad signal - why carry on sending it to Google?
Search is a competitive environment. If there are thing you won't do, others will
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
-
Canonical or hreflang?
I have four English sites for four different countries, UK, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and I want to share some content between the sites. On the pages that share the content, which is essentially exactly the same on all 4 sites, do I use the hreflang tags like: or do I add a canonical tag to the other three pointing to the "origin", which would be the UK site? I believe it is best practice to use one or the other, but I'm not sure which make sense in this situation.
Technical SEO | | andrew-mso0 -
Duplicate Content Issues with Pagination
Hi Moz Community, We're an eCommerce site so we have a lot of pagination issues but we were able to fix them using the rel=next and rel=prev tags. However, our pages have an option to view 60 items or 180 items at a time. This is now causing duplicate content problems when for example page 2 of the 180 item view is the same as page 4 of the 60 item view. (URL examples below) Wondering if we should just add a canonical tag going to the the main view all page to every page in the paginated series to get ride of this issue. https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=180&p=2 https://www.example.com/gifts/for-the-couple?view=all&n=60&p=4 Thoughts, ideas or suggestions are welcome. Thanks
Technical SEO | | znotes0 -
SERP Title shows up-with-dashes
Occasionally I see the our 'listings' on Google where the Title line shows up with dashes... like sony-professional-hard-drive - TapeandMedia.com It appears to be the URL shortened and rehashed. This example was after I searched for "Sony PSZ-HA1T" without the quotes. The title for this page is <title></span><span class="html-tag">Sony 1TB Professional Portable External Hard Disk Drive (PSZ-HA1T)</span><span class="html-tag"></title> and the url is http://www.tapeandmedia.com/sony-1tb-professional-portable-hard-drive.asp Link to image: http://i.imgur.com/FmvAn6c.jpg Other searches (like "Sony 1tb PSZ-HA1T") yield normal looking SERP Titles Does anyone know why this happens and what I can do to avoid this? FmvAn6c.jpg
Technical SEO | | BWallacejr0 -
Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce
Hi, My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles - The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are Products Map :: Company Name How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | frankrizzo0 -
Duplicate Title Tag issue due to Shopify CMS
Hi guys, I'm a novice really when it comes to SEO, yet have taken it in house for the next year or so, firstly because I have had my fingers burnt twice...and secondly, to allow me to recoup some of the loss from my prior campaigns. One thing I have noticed on my site (which uses a Shopify E-commerce CMS), is that Shopify duplicates a url for each my products. An example of this is http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/collections/designer-radiators-heating/products/reina-aliano
Technical SEO | | philscott2006
http://www.vidahomes.co.uk/products/reina-aliano Both products provide exactly the same information, yet appear in different ways subject to how the customer finds them. I contacted Shopify to find a fix to this issue when I noticed a high amount of Duplicate Title Tags in my SEO crawl. Their response was as follows. Using a rel canonical link will help prevent duplicate content issues with search engines. All you need to do is add this line of code: **<link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" />** ** before the tag in the theme.liquid file. It’s that simple :)** The theme liquid file basically generates the outer template for the whole site, and is only compromised when over-ruled. This all seems a little too easy for me, so I am hoping whether someone can elaborate as to whether this will work or not, as I'm not entirely sold on their response. I was always under the impression with canonical tags, that they should be added to the header section of the duplicate page in question, which refers back to the original page. The code I have been told to add above implies that the canonical tag would be added to every page in my site so the Google robot would have a hard time in finding anything at all of relevance Thanks in advance for any assistance with this. Kind Regards Phil Scott Vida Homes0 -
Duplicate Content and URL Capitalization
I have multiple URLs that SEOMoz is reporting as duplicate content. The reason is that there are characters in the URL that may, or may not, be capitalized depending on user input. A couple examples are: www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-sale www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/Houses-for-rent www.househitz.com/Pennsylvania/houses-for-rent There are currently thousands of instances of this on the site. Is this something I should spend effort to try and resolve (may not be minor effort), or should I just ignore it and move on?
Technical SEO | | Jom0 -
Hreflang on non-canonical pages
Hi! I've been trying to figure out what is the best way to solve this dilemma with duplicate content and multiple languages across domains. 1 product info page 2 same product but GREEN
Technical SEO | | LarsEriksson
3 same product but RED
4 same product but YELLOW **Question: ** Since pages 2,3,4 just varies slightly I use the canonical tag to indicate they are duplicates of page 1. Now I also want to indicate there are other language versions with the_ rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _element. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on the canonical page only pointing to the canonical page with "x" language. Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages pointing to the canonical page with the "x" language? Should I place the _rel="alternate" hreflang="x" _on all pages and then point it to the translated page (even if it is not a canonical page) ? /Lars0 -
How should I shorten my titles?
I've read that page titles can't/shouldn't be more than 70 characters long. Out of around 1,000 products we have about 150 that have legitimate titles that exceed this character limitation. We plan on automatically truncating these. Should I just cut the titles off at 70 characters or should I cut them off and add a "..."? Does it even matter?
Technical SEO | | dbuckles0