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
-
Bing webmaster tools incorrectly showing missing title and description tags
Hey all, Was wondering if anyone else has come across this issue. Bing is showing title and description tags missing in the head of my wordpress blog. I can't seem to find any documentation on this. Thanks, Roman
Technical SEO | | Dynata_panel_marketing0 -
Multilingual -> ahref lang, canonical and duplicated title content
Hi all! We have our site eurasmus.com where we are implementing the multilingual.
Technical SEO | | Eurasmus.com
We have already available english and spanish and we use basically href lang to control different areas. First question: When a page is not translated but still is visible in both langauges under /en and /es is it enough with the hreflang or should we
add a canonical as well? Nowadays we are apply href lang and only canonicals to the one which are duplicated
in the same language. Second question: When some pages are not translated, like http://eurasmus.com/en/info/find-intern-placement-austria and http://eurasmus.com/es/info/find-intern-placement-austria,
we are setting up the href lang but still moz detects title and meta duplicated (not duplicate page content).
What do you suggest we should do? Let me know and thank you before hand for your help!0 -
Can i use "nofollow" tag on product page (duplicated content)?
Hi, im working on my webstore SEO. I got descriptions from official seller like "Bosch". I got more than 15.000 items so i cant create unique content for each product. Can i use nofollow tag for each product and create great content on category pages? I dont wanna lose rankings because duplicated content. Thank you for help!
Technical SEO | | pejtupizdo0 -
Do H2 tags carry more weight than h4 tags?
Of course H tags are key signals for relevance in search. Does an h2 tag send a significantly "louder" signal than an h4 tag?
Technical SEO | | aj6130 -
Changing the Title Tag But It Does Not Reflect In Google Results
I have changed the page title for www.finanscaddesi.com to read as "Finans Caddesi | Paranın Pusulası" (as you can see from the source code) But Google still shows the old version. I have checked Google's guidelines regarding page titles. They say if we find a reference anchor text that is linking to the page (such as a DMOZ entry) we may use the anchor text as page title. I wonder whether there is a method I can follow to change the title tag to appear as "Finans Caddesi | Paranın Pusulası" in Google search results. Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | merkal20130 -
Drupal duplicate pages
Anyone else encountered massive numbers of duplicate pages being reported on SEO Moz crawls for Drupal based sites? I assumed it was b/c there was no redirect on the print format pages, so I fixed that with a cannonical tag. But still seeing 2 or 3 duplicate pages reported for many pages. Any experience fixing this would be awesome to hear about. Thanks, Kevin
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
Duplicate title tags and meta description tags
According to GWT, it seems that some of the pages on my website have duplicate title and meta tags. The pages identified by Google are nothing but dynamic pages: http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php
Technical SEO | | sbrault74
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=1
http://www.mywebsite.com/page.php?param=2 The thing is that I do use the canonical link tag on all pages. Should I also use the "robots noindex" tag when the page is invoked using a GET parameter? Again sorry for my english. Thank you, Stephane1 -
Why is Google stripping/replacing my TITLE tag for the site with the BRAND Name only when looking at BRAND level search
When doing a search in Google (US Proxy) - Google is stripping and replacing my functional TITLE with the brand name only (say 'Nike'), but if you do a specific search term like ('buy nike shoes') and see a top 10 listing for my site's homepage, now the title works and shows correctly. I saw this a few years ago with another one of my company domains, but didn't ask the question as it worked out. Thanks for any insight.. NOTE: It's not damaging any results, or rankings for the site.. but: when searching for BRAND name of the company, like I explained, it's replacing a optimized title for the BRAND name, and then re-placing it naturally when deep search brings up the homepage and the TITLE looks fine.. Very weird at best! Thanks, Rob
Technical SEO | | RobMay0