Duplicate keyphrases in page titles = penalty?
-
Hello Mozzers - just looking at a website which has duplicate keyphrases in its page titles...
So you have [keyphrase 1] | [exact match Keyphrase 1]
Now I happen to know this particular site has suffered a dramatic fall in traffic - the SEO agency working on the site had advised the client to duplicate keyphrases. Hard to believe, huh!
What I'm wondering is whether this extensive exact match keyphrase duplication might've been enough to attract a penalty? Your thoughts would be welcome.
-
That's an interesting thought Luke. Yes, I agree something like that would work much better. I think a group like that would need some strong affiliations with already recognised online groups of like-minded SEO people (like on Moz) to give it gravity and value, but it could work. I don't know if such a group exists.
Peter
-
Hi Peter - you make some good points.
Perhaps something like you have in public relations - perhaps you join an institute (or a new branch of Moz) by paying a fee and signing up to a code of conduct - if a client is unhappy with your conduct, they can lodge a complaint and challenge your position as a member of the said organisation. That would be a great way forward and restore some level of trust in the industry. A kind of self-regulation if you like.
-
An interesting thought but I'm not sure the industry should be regulated.
My experience when governments get involved is that they then start implementing laws and rules without really understanding the industry. This happened around 18 months ago when the EU implemented the 'cookie law', a rule to outlaw bad practice that made it harder for sites to make their pages easy to navigate and engage with and harder for users to browse the web.
In a sense, the changes Google has made to its algorithms over time have acted as a regulator. If you don't follow good practice then you will end up losing. There's lots of companies out there not just in the SEO world delivering poor, unregulated service. But SEO agencies who continue with bad practice will soon lose reputation and go out of business.
Anyway, all the best to you,
Peter -
Which is the case, unfortunately. Just auditing the backlinks. Gulp. I really do think SEO industry needs to be regulated in some way. There's just so much dubious stuff going on.
-
Yes, very odd that an SEO agency should do this.
It's a dumb tactic, but I doubt it would confer a penalty. More like downgrade the quality of the page and cause it to drop but I would be surprised if this alone would be responsible for the site you mention to suffer a dramatic fall in traffic.
If, as you say, the SEO agency was responsible for doing this, then it's likely that the same agency would have also been responsible for other dumb to verging on spammy tactics on this site with the cumulative result being a significant drop.
Peter
-
In this case I'm seeing titles like this - they're doubled up on the same page:
vacations in Florida | vacations in Florida
No duplication between pages - just the doubling up of keyphrases on each page. Very odd indeed! SEO agency concerned had actually put this in place for client.
-
Yes I agree with Chris. There are thousands of sites with duplicate page Titles. They would be typically be sites which have not been optimised at all where the company service and company name are duplicated on every page as a default setting.
I doubt whether Google pays attention to that in terms of the site trying to manipulate search results. If anything they are undermining the search performance of their site themselves by making it harder for search engines to understand the focus of each page. That an SEO company advised them to do this is the most surprising.
Peter
-
Luke,
It's unlikely that would be be enough to incur a penalty. Not that revising those title might not help but typically, that would be more along the lines of poor optimization rather than outright spam.
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
-
Does it make sense to create new pages with friendlier URLs then redirect old pages to new?
Hi Moz! My client has messy URLs. does it make sense to write new clean URLs, then 301 redirect all old URLs to the new ones? Thanks for reading!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | DA20130 -
Showing on page 25 for url keyword/ brand, is it a penalty?
Hi I have a site which shows on page 25 in G serps for the main brand keyword which is also the url its a .com and as far as I can see has no penalties and has unique content. The keyword itself has no competition and the site should be no1 in G for it. Our site domain is 11 years old.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MoneySite0 -
K3 duplicate page content and title tags
I'm running a Joomla site, have just installed k2 as our blogging platform. Our Crawl Report with SEOMOZ shows a good bit of duplicate content and duplicate title tags with our K2 blog. We've installed sh404SEF. Will I need to go into sh404SEF each time we generate a blog entry to point the titles to one URL? If there is something simpler please advise. Thank you, Don
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | donaldmoore0 -
Merging your google places page with google plus page.
I have a map listing showing for the keyword junk cars for cash nj. I recently created a new g+ page and requested a merge between the places and the + page. now when you do a search you see the following. Junk Cars For Cash NJ LLC
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | junkcars
junkcarforcashnj.com/
Google+ page - Google+ page the first hyperlink takes me to the about page of the G+ and the second link takes me to the posts section within g+. Is this normal? should i delete the places account where the listing was originally created? Or do i leave it as is? Thanks0 -
SEO Penalties for Splitting Page for Two Store Locations
Hello fellow SEO'ers! I have a question regarding the overall SEO implications of using a single page to describe the services/products offered at two different locations. The locations are in two different states/cities. I have tried to explain to the client that I working with that this is essentially splitting the page in two from a search ranking perspective. I have a feeling that Google sees this page as partially dedicated to one city, and partly to another... meaning that it won't rank as well as it could for either city. Is my thinking correct? Seems logical. The client has done this site-wide for every service/product that they offer in their facilities. I'm offering some title/description recommendations for the entire site right now, and I'm going back and forth with myself whether to include the city names in the titles and descriptions at all. Let me know what you smart folks think. I appreciate it. Sam
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | theBREWROOM0 -
Duplicate Content on Product Pages
I'm getting a lot of duplicate content errors on my ecommerce site www.outdoormegastore.co.uk mainly centered around product pages. The products are completely different in terms of the title, meta data, product descriptions and images (with alt tags)but SEOmoz is still identifying them as duplicates and we've noticed a significant drop in google ranking lately. Admittedly the product descriptions are a little bit thin but I don't understand why the pages would be viewed as duplicates and therefore can be ranked lower? The content is definitely unique too. As an example these three pages have been identified as being duplicates of each other. http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/regatta-landtrek-25l-rucksack.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/canyon-bryce-adult-cycling-helmet-9045.html http://www.outdoormegastore.co.uk/outwell-minnesota-6-carpet-for-green-07-08-tent.html
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | gavinhoman0 -
Linking to local pages on main page - keyword self-cannibalization issue?
Hi guys, Our website has this landing page: www.example.com/service1/ Is this considered keyword self-cannibalization if on the above page we link to local pages such as: www.example.com/service1-in-chicago/ www.example.com/service1-in-newyork/ www.example.com/service1-in-texas/ Many thanks David
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sssrpm0 -
Wordpress Titles
My question is about long url titles, my client is using wordpress and the rankings are going well apart from two, which for some reason just wont move. After using some of the tools available on SEO moz which i have found very helpful I have spotted a re-occuring warning throughout the site, the titles, in word press you have this setting (below) page title : %page_title% | %blog_title% My question is my client has quite good brand online but I done want to impact this. The problem I have is that I have a Keyword in the title then the clients company name which is three words and takes up a lot of space. I am thinking about removing this but in two minds so i was kinda hoping for a bit of advice as this looks like a standard in wordpress. Mike
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TomBarker820