Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicating words in the page title OK?
-
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/servicesthe word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication
-
Hi,
While there is no excessive use of keywords, you do not have to have any problems. Always look for naturalness and above all try and experiment. You can read more about keyword stuffing to avoid possible Google penalties
Regards
-
My recommendation is to always test, test, test. Your default should be to test and use the title tag that gets you the combination of best rankings and highest click-through rate. And to find the optimal title tag, you should be testing one's that duplicate keywords too.
I'll give you an example but I'm going to change out the actual essential oil name used so my client remains anonymous.
On March 5th, a specific page was ranking on Google as follows:
- #19 for "catnip essential oil"
- #17 for "catnip oil"
- #7 for "where to buy catnip oil"
The title tag at the time on that page was: "Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name".
I changed the title tag to "Catnip Essential Oil - Where To Buy Catnip Oil | Website Name".
After the page was recrawled by Google the rankings moved up to better positions. Here are the results:
- "catnip essential oil" has been as high as #6 but is at #9 today.
- "catnip oil" has been as high as #8 but is at #10 today.
- "where to buy catnip oil" moved up to #1 and remains there today
- No change in click-through rate
As you can see the results are better even with duplicating the words "catnip" and "oil" in the title tag.
Someone suggested that I should have just changed the title tag to "Where to Buy Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name". That is a worthwhile test and maybe I'll do that still just to see what happens but for now I actually prefer having both "catnip essential oil" and "catnip oil" in my title tag.
Hopefully you can see from this real world result that you can have duplicate words in your title tag and that testing is more important than following so called "best practices".
-
Hi,
In the example you have given, I cannot see the benefit, especially because people aren't going to be searching for "our services" in particular. I agree with your opinion that it would make better sense for you to rewrite the meta title so it flows better.
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
-
Is it better to keep a glossary or terms on one page or break it up into multiple pages?
We have a very large glossary of over 1000 industry terms on our site with links to reference material, embedded video, etc. Is it better for SEO purposes to keep this on one page or should we break it up into multiple pages, a different page for each letter for example? Thanks.
On-Page Optimization | | KenW0 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
SVG image files causing multiple title tags on page - SEO issue?
Does anyone have any experience with SVG image files and on-page SEO? A client is using them and it seems they use the title tag in the same way a regular image (JPG/PNG) would use an image ALT tag. I'm concerned that search engines will see the multiple title tags on the page and that this will cause SEO issues. Regular crawlers like Moz flag it as a second title tag, however it's outside the header and in a SVG wrap so the crawlers really should understand that this is a SVG title rather than a second page title. But is this the case? If anyone has experience with this, I'd love to hear about it.
On-Page Optimization | | mrdavidingram2 -
How to Handle duplicate pages/titles in Wordpress
The wordpress blog causes problems with page titles. If you go to the second page of blog posts it there's a different URL but with the same page title. for example: page 1: site/blog page 2: site/blog/page/2 Each page gets flagged for duplicate page titles. Thanks in advance for your thoughts,
On-Page Optimization | | heymarshall1 -
Punctuation at the Start of Page Titles
one of my clients appears to be using an exclamation mark (e.g. "! Graphic Prints By Mirrorin - Fun Childrens Graphic Prints") and to be completely honest, I have no idea if this is bad practice or if it wont have any affect from an SEO point of view? Any help would be appreciated because it is site wide, therefore if it is an issue I would like to be able to get it sorted asap! Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | ZaddleMarketing0 -
Title tag for category page
I'd like to know your views on the best approach for title tags for category pages for ecommerce sites. 3 examples A) Category name | Free delivery on $50 purchase | Brand name B) Discover best "category name" on brand name C) Category Name | 1st Keyword, 2nd keyword | Brand name Thanks!
On-Page Optimization | | walidalsaqqaf0 -
Is it ok to use encoded special characters in meta titles?
I've read blog posts stating that encoding special characters in title tags is both ok and not ok. Any definitive answer out there? Do the extra characters from adding encoding count towards the total number of characters that Google displays in SERPs? Or do they just count as one character?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
Avoiding "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" - Best Practices?
We have a website with a searchable database of recipes. You can search the database using an online form with dropdown options for: Course (starter, main, salad, etc)
On-Page Optimization | | smaavie
Cooking Method (fry, bake, boil, steam, etc)
Preparation Time (Under 30 min, 30min to 1 hour, Over 1 hour) Here are some examples of how URLs may look when searching for a recipe: find-a-recipe.php?course=starter
find-a-recipe.php?course=main&preperation-time=30min+to+1+hour
find-a-recipe.php?cooking-method=fry&preperation-time=over+1+hour There is also pagination of search results, so the URL could also have the variable "start", e.g. find-a-recipe.php?course=salad&start=30 There can be any combination of these variables, meaning there are hundreds of possible search results URL variations. This all works well on the site, however it gives multiple "Duplicate Page Title" and "Duplicate Page Content" errors when crawled by SEOmoz. I've seached online and found several possible solutions for this, such as: Setting canonical tag Adding these URL variables to Google Webmasters to tell Google to ignore them Change the Title tag in the head dynamically based on what URL variables are present However I am not sure which of these would be best. As far as I can tell the canonical tag should be used when you have the same page available at two seperate URLs, but this isn't the case here as the search results are always different. Adding these URL variables to Google webmasters won't fix the problem in other search engines, and will presumably continue to get these errors in our SEOmoz crawl reports. Changing the title tag each time can lead to very long title tags, and it doesn't address the problem of duplicate page content. I had hoped there would be a standard solution for problems like this, as I imagine others will have come across this before, but I cannot find the ideal solution. Any help would be much appreciated. Kind Regards5
