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
-
Canonical Tags for Legacy Duplicate Content
I've got a lot of duplicate pages, especially products, and some are new but most have been like this for a long time; up to several years. Does it makes sense to use a canonical tag pointing to one master page for each product. Each page is slightly different with a different feature and includes maybe a sentence or two that is unique but everything else is the same.
Technical SEO | | AmberHanson0 -
Duplicate Page Titles For Paginated Topics In Blog
Hello, I've just run a site audit and it has come up with a duplicate title tag issue for the topics section of our blog. For example it is flagging that the following have the same page title. https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name https://blog.companyname.com/topic/topic-name/page/2 How significant is this as an SEO issue and what are the ways we can go about fixing this? I look forward to any suggestions and guidance that can be provided. Thanks, John
Technical SEO | | SEOCT1 -
Google ignoring the Title Tag?
Anybody seen this too? We have a webpage with tiny different title tag and H1. If you search for let's say "Renovatie", you get to see the title tag "De kostprijs van je renovatie". However, when you search with the search term "Wat kost een renovatie", we see the H1 title in the SERP, which is "Wat kost een renovatie". So that's normal when you search a term that's exact the same as the H1 tag, Google ignores the title tag? N.
Technical SEO | | nans0 -
How to avoid duplicate content
Hi, I have a website which is ranking on page 1: www.oldname.com/landing-page But because of legal reason i had to change the name.
Technical SEO | | mikehenze
So i moved the landing page to a different domain.
And 301'ed this landing page to the new domain (and removed all products). www.newname.com/landing-page All the meta data, titles, products are still the same. www.oldname.com/landing-page is still on the same position
And www.newname.com/landing-page was on page 1 for 1 day and is now on page 4. What did i do wrong and how can I fix this?
Maybe remove www.oldname.com/landing-page from Google with Google Webmaster Central or not allow crawling of this page with .htaccess ?0 -
Swapping key phrases in URL, Title and H1 tag
I was wondering if swapping key phrases would still work in URL, Titlte and H1 tags For example: <code>Car Sales Melbourne Sales Car Melbourne carsalesmelbourne.com.au salescarmelbourne.com.au</code> So the second key phrase would you be able to get similar effect with correct key phrase or if location is different, would this not work at all?
Technical SEO | | Jae830 -
Catch 22 on duplicate page titles
Hi all, I'm quite new to the SEO space so I apologise if all the information below isn't technically perfect. I ran the SEOmoz pro tool for the first time a month ago (fantastic tool). It picked up a wealth of errors on our site that we are now working on. the problem: we use dynamic pages to display job listings pulled from our database that have picked up many duplicate page titles and content. For example: _Landing page: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/it-contract-jobs/sec=itcontractjobs _Page 2: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/1/-/-/2/itcontractjobs-/9999/2 _Page 3: _http://www.arm.co.uk/jobs/1/-/-/2/itcontractjobs-/9999/3 Following the results of the Moz tool we have now 'no indexed' and 'no followed' the dynamic pages and the errors have dramatically dropped, great! However, on reflection we generate quite a lot of traffic to individual job's listed on our website. By no following the pages we have restricted passing on any 'juice' to these pages, and by no indexing we may be taking them out of Googles index completely. These dynamic pages and individual job listings do generate a lot of traffic to our website via organic search. We do submit the site index to Google that should index the individual jobs that way. So, the question is (I hope this is making sense), are the gains of reducing errors picked up in the moz tool (to improve the overall site performance) likely to outweigh the traffic generated on these dynamically generated pages by being indexed and followed by Google. Ultimately we would like the static landing pages to retain a stronger page rank. Any guidance is very much appreciated. Best Regards,
Technical SEO | | ARMofficial
Sam.0 -
Using the Canonical Tag
Hi, I have an issue that can be solve with a canonical tag, but I am not sure yet, we are developing a page full of statistics, like this: www.url.com/stats/ But filled with hundreds of stats, so users can come and select only the stats they want to see and share with their friends, so it becomes like a new page with their slected stats: www.url.com/stats/?id=mystats The problems I see on this is: All pages will be have a part of the content from the main page 1) and many of them will be exactly the same, so: duplicate content. My idea was to add the canonical tag of "www.url.com/stats/" to all pages, similar as how Rand does it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps But I am not sure of this solution because the content is not exactly the same, page 2) will only have a part of the content that page 1) has, and in some cases just a very small part. Is the canonical tag useful in this case? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | andresgmontero0
