What does Google consider a "Duplicate Title Tag?"
-
Do the title tags have to be exactly the same, or can they have some of the same keywords but different context?
Hypothetical example:
- Home Page = Raising a Kitten, Tips & Tricks for a Healthy Cat
- Sub-Page = How to Cat-Proof your Home when Raising a Kitten
Since both title tags has "raising a kitten," "cat" and "tips" would this be considered a "Duplicate Title Tag" even though the pages have completely different content in them?
Thanks in advance!
-
I'm not certain duplicate means exactly the same when it comes to titles. I've seen instances on particularly on large ecommerce sites where titles are blatantly auto-generated and are not displayed by Google in SERPs:
e.g. "buy <parent category="">and <subcategory products="">from xyz shop at great prices"</subcategory></parent>
In view it's likely that Google is aware of this from a quality guidelines standpoint. Where possible, titles should be individually crafted.
-
Looks like you have a few pages that may be the same. If you use a CMS (content management system) like Joomla or Wordpress, chances are that users and search engines may be accessing multiple versions of the same page. What is the URL in question? I'll take a look.
Also, this might help. Google
Create descriptive page titles
Titles are critical to giving users a quick insight into the content of a result and why it’s relevant to their query. It's often the primary piece of information used to decide which result to click on, so it's important to use high-quality titles on your web pages.
Here are a few tips for managing your titles:
- As explained above, make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the
<title></code> tag</strong>. If you’ve got a large site and are concerned you may have forgotten a title somewhere, the <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists missing or potentially problematic <code><title></code> tags on your site.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Page titles should be <strong>descriptive and concise</strong>. Avoid vague descriptors like <code>"Home"</code> for your home page, or <code>"Profile"</code>for a specific person's profile. Also avoid unnecessarily long or verbose titles, which are likely to get truncated when they show up in the search results.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>keyword stuffing</strong>. It's sometimes helpful to have a few descriptive terms in the title, but there’s no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times. A title like <code>"Foobar, foo bar, foobars, foo bars"</code> doesn't help the user, and this kind of <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=66358">keyword stuffing</a> can make your results look spammy to Google and to users.</li> </ul> </ul> <p> </p> <ul> <ul> <li>Avoid <strong>repeated or boilerplate titles</strong>. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive titles for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site "Cheap products for sale", for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another. Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information ("boilerplate" titles) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like <code>"<band name> - See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts"</code> contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the title to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words "video", "lyrics", etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics. Another option is to just use <code>"<band name>"</code> as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site's content. The <a href="https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/answer.py?answer=80407">HTML suggestions</a> page in Webmaster Tools lists any duplicate titles Google detected on your pages.</li> </ul> </ul> <ul> <ul> <li><strong>Brand your titles</strong>, but concisely. The title of your site’s home page is a reasonable place to include some additional information about your site—for instance, <code>"ExampleSocialSite, a place for people to meet and mingle."</code> But displaying that text in the title of every single page on your site hurts readability and will look particularly repetitive if several pages from your site are returned for the same query. In this case, consider including just your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe, like this: <pre><title>ExampleSocialSite: Sign up for a new account.</title>
*` Be careful about disallowing search engines from crawling your pages. Using the robots.txt protocol on your site can stop Google from crawling your pages, but it may not always prevent them from being indexed. For example, Google may index your page if we discover it by following a link from someone else's site. To display it in search results, Google will need to display a title of some kind and because we won't have access to any of your page content, we will rely on off-page content such as anchor text from other sites. (To truly block a URL from being indexed, you can use meta tags.)
If we’ve detected that a particular result has one of the above issues with its title, we may try to generate an improved title from anchors, on-page text, or other sources. However, sometimes even pages with well-formulated, concise, descriptive titles will end up with different titles in our search results to better indicate their relevance to the query. There’s a simple reason for this: the title tag as specified by a webmaster is limited to being static, fixed regardless of the query. Once we know the user’s query, we can often find alternative text from a page that better explains why that result is relevant. Using this alternative text as a title helps the user, and it also can help your site. Users are scanning for their query terms or other signs of relevance in the results, and a title that is tailored for the query can increase the chances that they will click through.`**
- As explained above, make sure every page on your site has a title specified in the
-
Duplicate for META title would be simple as exact same title. Period.
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
-
Sale page ranking for "[blank] for sale" keywords
My company's Ecommerce site has a sale category that is currently out performing some of our normal categories in the SERPs for "[blank] for sale" keywords. For example the sale category landing page is ranking for the keyword "vegetable seeds for sale" rather than the vegetable seed category. Has anyone ever dealt with a similar situation to this? or does anyone have general advice for optimizing (or weakening) sale pages?
On-Page Optimization | | Scoleman1 -
Website Titles in Google
I currently have a Wordpress platform website and previously I noticed that when I optimized my pages, if I indicated what I wanted my page names to be (through an application like SEO Yoast) that most times, the keyword would show up exactly how I had it typed in. Recently I have noticed that the title of my website is showing in my page titles too. So for example: Before: Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company Now: XYZ Company | Shoe Stores Windsor - XYZ Company In SEO practices, I know it's most often best to have the keyword you would like as close to the front of your title tag, but now this recent search adds my website title first. Plus this also seems to be making my titles longer. I know Google ultimately has the 'final say' in a page title and I have ensured that I have the "rewrite titles/descriptions option" check in Wordpress to allow me to overwrite titles, but I am hoping someone can possibly provide me with a tip or trick to avoid this in search rankings. I think it's important to have the name of my site entered through Wordpress so that any pages that I have no optimized default to the page name and site name, but the ones I have optimized seem to be showing differently all of a sudden. Any help is greatly appreciated! Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | MainstreamMktg0 -
Duplicate Content?
Hi All, I have a new client site, a static site with navigation across the top, and down the left side. Two of the menus from the top navigation are replicated in the navigation structure on the left hand side. They have the exact same url structure, they are in fact the same exact page, listed on the site in two areas. My question is - is this a case of duplicate content, or, as they urls are the exact same, will they be seen as a single page? A canonical tag on one would be replicated on the other by the CMS - so do I leave it, or try to get them to re-structure removing one of the links? (I doubt they will do this as its a brand new site they just has developed). Many thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | Webrevolve0 -
The word "in" between 2 keywords influence on SEO
Does anybody know when you have the word "in" between two keywords has this a negative influence in Google? For example: "Holiday Home Germany" is the search term in Google
On-Page Optimization | | Bram76
"Holiday Home in Germany" as h1 on our website or do we have to use "Holiday Home Germany" on our website?0 -
Fewer keywords in title tag?
Hello, I have a title tag that includes three keywords and has a total of 59 characters. The third keyword is not very important. If I eliminated the third keyword, leaving the first two (for a total of 48 characters), would the ranking value of the first two keywords increase? Does including the third keyword dilute the value of the first two? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Title Tags: Does having the singular and plural version of the keyword hurt the ranking?
I'm wondering if there is a duplication issue with having a singular AND plural version of a keyword in the Title Tag. For example: Wood Desk - Wood Desks| Furniture Store Would this help or hurt my ranking for this URL? I can’t find a concrete answer for this under Moz’s “Title Tag SEO Best Practices Page.” Thanks for your help!
On-Page Optimization | | jampaper0 -
"And" vs "&"
I blog for hotels and I am wondering whether it is best to have on a wordpress tagline the name of the hotel such as Holiday Inn and Suites vs Holiday Inn & Suites. In Google AdWords, the "and" keyword always beats out the "&" word in exact search. The "&" just always looks cleaner. Also, when I refer to the hotel within a blog post, should I use the "and" or "&" in the name? Please help me understand which is best for seo. Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | lwilkins0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710