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
-
Duplicates - How to know if trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages?
Hi, How do you determine whether trailing slashes are creating duplicate pages? Search Console is showing both /about and about/ for example but how do I know whether this is a problem? Thanks James
Technical SEO | | CamperConnect140 -
Duplicate Content Question
I have a client that operates a local service-based business. They are thinking of expanding that business to another geographic area (a drive several hours away in an affluent summer vacation area). The name of the existing business contains the name of the city, so it would not be well-suited to market 'City X' business in 'City Y'. My initial thought was to (for the most part) 'duplicate' the existing site onto a new site (brand new root domain). Much of the content would be the exact same. We could re-word some things so there aren't entire lengthy paragraphs of identical info, but it seems pointless to completely reinvent the wheel. We'll get as creative as possible, but certain things just wouldn't change. This seems like the most pragmatic thing to do given their goals, but I'm worried about duplicate content. It doesn't feel as though this is spammy though, so I'm not sure if there's cause for concern.
Technical SEO | | stevefidelity0 -
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 -
Why is there duplicates of my domain
When viewing crawl diagnostics in SEOmoz I can see both "www.website.com" and a truncated version "website.com" is this normal and why is it showing (I do not have duplicates of my site on the server)? E.g.: http://www.klinehimalaya.com/
Technical SEO | | gorillakid
http://klinehimalaya.com/0 -
Has any positive or negative effect for the SEO results if the domain contains desired keyword?
Helo! Has any positive or negative effect for the SEO results if the domain contains desired keyword? Thanks for the answer.
Technical SEO | | Brainsum0 -
Duplicate Content Issue
Very strange issue I noticed today. In my SEOMoz Campaigns I noticed thousands of Warnings and Errors! I noticed that any page on my website ending in .php can be duplicated by adding anything you want to the end of the url, which seems to be causing these issues. Ex: Normal URL - www.example.com/testing.php Duplicate URL - www.example.com/testing.php/helloworld The duplicate URL displays the page without the images, but all the text and information is present, duplicating the Normal page. I Also found that many of my PDFs seemed to be getting duplicated burried in directories after directories, which I never ever put in place. Ex: www.example.com/catalog/pdfs/testing.pdf/pdfs/another.pdf/pdfs/more.pdfs/pdfs/ ... when the pdfs are only located in a pdfs directory! I am very confused on how to fix this problem. Maybe with some sort of redirect?
Technical SEO | | hfranz0 -
Duplicate Title Tags On Blogs
Hello Mozzers, I have a client who has a blog and articles section on their website, due to the amount of content they have in these section they have multiples pages so it would be like.. www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p1 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p2 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p3 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p4 All obvioulsy with seperate content in each blog/article posts but the meta descriptions on title tags for this p1,p2,p3,p4 and so on are all the same, is this a major issue? and if so how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
Empty <a>tag (no href or name attribute specificed) potential effect on link juice</a>
I have a client that insists on using the ProPhoto WordPress theme. This theme has an interesting habit of putting empty anchor tags in the site nav in order to nest css dropdowns. By empty I mean totally empty. For example: <a>Navigation Link</a> Since the anchor does not specify a destiation, do you think it would have any effect on link juice one way or the other? This wouldn't count as an additional link on the page would it? My inclination and personal practice is not to risk quirky things like this, but I'd like a second opinion before I suggest changes to the client's site. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Dameian2