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
-
Does it hurt SEO to build landing pages in HubSpot instead of directly in Word Press?
Our team's website is built in Word Press, but we use Hub Spot as our CRM. We are trying to determine if building landing pages in Hub Spot is going to hurt our SEO efforts and if it's better to build directly on Word Press.
On-Page Optimization | | MerlinLaw0 -
Do You Add City Name & Key Word For Every Page?
Hello, I'm new to SEO but feel I have a decent grasp on it. However, I had a question pertaining to key words and using my city name in it. For instance, if I am using the key word "herniated disc treatment" do I need to put in my city name behind it or does google recognize that I am already in my city area because of my geo tagging and having it listed on the footer of my site? Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! -Scott
On-Page Optimization | | slgray0 -
Should we rename and update a page or create a new page entirely?
Hi Moz Peoples! We have a small site with a simple site navigation, with only a few links on the nav bar. We have been doing some work to create a new page, which will eventually replace one of the links on the nav bar. The question we are having is, is it better to rename the existing page and replace its content and then wait for the great indexer to do its thing, or perm delete the page and replace it with the new page and content? Or is this a case where it really makes no difference as long as the redirects are set up correctly?
On-Page Optimization | | Parker8180 -
Include Site Name in Page Titles or not
i would like to ask if it is a good practice or not to Include Site Name in Page Titles. My page is not selling products it is about plagiarism checker tool. i will give one example in one page we are writing about the plagiarism types so the page title is plagiarism types and then is the site name. what is the better practice? Keep it or not? thanks in advance
On-Page Optimization | | anavasis3 -
Snippet showing as domain name with apostrophe, instead of page title when searching for the domain name.
Hi, We have an issue with one of our websites, with the snippet dispaying differently in Google serps when searching for the domain or the website name rather than a search term. When searching for a search term, the page title shows as expected, but when searching for the site by the domain name either with or without the tld, it shows the snippet as the domain name with an apostrophe at the end. Domain is subli.co.uk Thanks in advance for any advice!
On-Page Optimization | | K3v1n0 -
Duplicate Content on Event Pages
My client has a pretty popular service of event listings and, in hope of gathering more events, they opened up the platform to allow users to add events. This works really well for them and they are able to garner a lot more events this way. The major problem I'm finding is that many event coordinators and site owners will take the copy from their website and copy and paste it, duplicating a lot of the content. We have editor picks that contain a lot of unique content but the duplicate content scares me. It hasn't hurt our page ranking (we have a page ranking of 7) but I'm wondering if this is something that we should address. We don't have the manpower to eliminate all the duplication but if we cut down the duplication would we experience a significant advantage over people posting the same event?
On-Page Optimization | | mattdinbrooklyn0 -
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 -
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