Duplicate Page Title for a Large Listing Website
-
My company has a popular website that has over 4,000 crawl errors showing in Moz, most of them coming up as Duplicate Page Title. These duplicate page titles are coming from pages with the title being the keyword, then location, such as:
"main keyword" North Carolina
"main keyword" Texas... and so forth. These pages are ranked and get a lot of traffic. I was wondering what the best solution is for resolving these types of crawl errors without it effecting our rankings.
Thanks!
-
Thanks, everyone, for the responses. I downloaded the crawl error CSV and sorted it by duplicate title... there a lot of cities without states attached to them, so that's where all the thousands of duplicate titles are coming from and we're taking care of that fast!
Thanks!
-
I'd recommend you use a crawler like Screaming Frog and find out what the issue is. Do you see the duplicate titles or descriptions issue in your Google Webmaster Console ? Check under Optimization > HTML Improvements to see what Google is reporting.
-
As Takeshi said, you shouldn't be getting a duplicate title error if each location in the title is different. Definitely should check Google Webmaster Tools as he said. I suspect it may be a canonical problem, or www vs non-www duplicate content issue. Or perhaps an http and https issue. Without knowing your site details, that would be something to check.
-
If you are appending the city name to the keyword, then it's not a duplicate title. There must be other pages somewhere on your site that are generating the duplicate titles. If you are using Google Webmaster Tools, it will show you all the duplicate titles on your site as well as which pages are using the same title.
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
-
Gradual Drop in GWT Indexed Pages for large website
Hey all, I am working on SEO for a massive sports website. The information provided will be limited but I will give you as much context as possible. I just started digging into it and have found several on-page SEO issues of which I will fix when I get to the meat of it but this seems like something else could be going on. I have attached an image below. It doesn't seem like it's a GWT bug as reported at one point either as it's been gradually dropping over the past year. Also, there is about a 20% drop in traffic in Google Analytics over this time as well. This website has hundreds of thousands of pages of player profiles, sports team information and more all marked up with JSON-LD. Some of the on-page stuff that needs to be fixed are the h1 and h2, title tags and meta description. Also, some of the descriptions are pulled from wikipedia and linked to a "view more" area. Anchor text has "sign up" language as well. Not looking for a magic bullet but to be pointed in the right direction. Where should I start checking off to ensure I cover my bases besides the on page stuff above? There aren't any serious errors and I don't see any manual penalties. There are 4,300 404's but I have seen plenty of sites with that many 404's all of which still got traffic. It doesn't look like a sitemap was submitted to GWT and when I try submitting sitemap.xml, I get a 504 error (network unreachable). Thanks for reading. I am just getting started on this project but would like to spend as much time sharpening the axe before getting to work. lJWk8Rh
Technical SEO | | ArashG0 -
1000 Pages on old website. What to do with the 301 redirects for this domain?
Hi Moz Community, I have a 301 redirect question... I just acquired an old domain: Totally in my niche Domain is 14 years old Website exists of 1000 pages Great amount of backlinks Website is offline since about 2 weeks Will place a new website online asap with new url structure For the 50 best scoring pages I wrote a new, but fully comparable/related article. I will put a 301 redirect from those old to the new pages. My question: What to do with the 950 other url's? Should I put a 301 redirect to the homepage? Should I forward those pages to the 404 page? Should I divide the 950 url's with a 301 redirect to the 50 new ones? Another solution maybe? Any idea what would be the best solution so we can save as much Google juice as possible? Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | snorkel0 -
My client is using a mobile template for their local pages and the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions
So my client has 2000+ different store locations. Each location has the standard desktop location and my client opted for a corresponding mobile template for each location. Now the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions. However this is only because the mobile template and desktop store pages are using the exact same title/meta description tag. Is Google penalizing my client for this? Would it be worth it to update the mobile template title/meta description tags?
Technical SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Inconsistent page titles in SERP's
I encountered a strange phenomenon lately and I’d like to hear if you have any idea what’s causing it. For the past couple of weeks I’ve seen some our Google rankings getting unstable. While looking for a cause, I found that for some pages, Google results display another page title than the actual meta title of the page. Examples http://www.atexopleiding.nl Meta title: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring - Atexopleiding.nl Title in SERP: Atexopleiding.nl: Atex cursus opleider met ruim 40 jaar ervaring http://www.reedbusinessopleidingen.nl/opleidingen/veiligheid/veiligheidskunde Meta title: Opleiding Veiligheidskunde, MBO & HBO - Reed Business Opleidingen Title in SERP: Veiligheidskunde - Reed Business Opleidingen http://www.pbna.com/vca-examens/ Meta title: Behaal uw VCA diploma bij de grootste van Nederland - PBNA Title in SERP: VCA Examens – PBNA I’ve looked in the source code, fetched some pages as Googlebot in WMT, but the title shown in the SERP doesn’t even exist in the source code. Now I suspect this might have something to do with the “cookiewall” implemented on our sites. Here’s why: Cookiewall was implemented end of January The problem didn’t exist until recently, though I can’t pinpoint an exact date. Problem exists on both rbo.nl, atexopleiding.nl & pbna.com, the latter running on Silverstripe CMS instead of WP. This rules out CMS specific causes. The image preview in the SERPS of many pages show the cookie alert overlay However, I’m not able to technically prove that the cookiescript causes this and I’d like to rule out other any obvious causes before I "blame it on the cookies" :). What do you think?
Technical SEO | | RBO0 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, The pro dashboard crawler bot thing that you get here reports the mydomain.com and mydomain.com/index.htm as duplicate pages. Is this a problem? If so how do I fix it? Thanks Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Diagnostics say I'm missing Page titles... but I am not?
I've been running a crawl of one of our new site builds for a couple of weeks. The Diagnostics picked up a couple of issues, which was great, but it's saying we're missing Page Titles and Descriptions on pages that we have Page Titles and Descriptions. Anyone come across this before?
Technical SEO | | niamhomahony0 -
"nofollow pages" or "duplicate content"?
We have a huge site with lots of geographical-pages in this structure: domain.com/country/resort/hotel domain.com/country/resort/hotel/facts domain.com/country/resort/hotel/images domain.com/country/resort/hotel/excursions domain.com/country/resort/hotel/maps domain.com/country/resort/hotel/car-rental Problem is that the text on ie. /excursions is often exactly the same on .../alcudia/hotel-sea-club/excursion and .../alcudia/hotel-beach-club/excursion The two hotels offer the same excursions, and the intro text on the pages are the exact same throughout the entire site. This is also a problem on the /images and /car-rental pages. I think in most cases the only difference on these pages is the Title, description and H1. These pages do not attract a lot of visits through search-engines. But to avoid them being flagged as duplicate content (we have more than 4000 of these pages - /excursions, /maps, /car-rental, /images), do i add a nofollow-tag to these, do i block them in robots.txt or should i just leave them and live with them being flagged as duplicate content? Im waiting for our web-team to add a function to insert a geographical-name in the text, so i could add ie #HOTELNAME# in the text and thereby avoiding the duplicate text. Right now we have intros like: When you visit the hotel ... instead of: When you visit Alcudia Sea Club But untill the web-team has fixed these GEO-tags, what should i do? What would you do and why?
Technical SEO | | alsvik0 -
Duplicate Page Titles and %3E, how can I avoid this?
In my crawl report I keep seeing duplicate page title warning with URL's being referenced twice: e.g. /company/ceo-message/ /company/ceo-message/%3E I'm using canonical link tags but after the new crawl report, I'm still seeing this duplicate page title crawl error. How can I avoid this? I've been looking for answers for a few days but don't seem to see this exact problem discussed. Any insight is appreciated!
Technical SEO | | mxmo0