How will engines deal with duplicate head elements e.g. title or canonicals?
-
Obviously duplicate content is never a good thing...on separate URL's. Question is, how will the engines deal with duplicate meta tags on the same page.
Example Head Tag:
<title>Example Title - #1</title>
<title>Example Title - #2</title>
My assumption is that Google (and others) will take the first instance of the tag, such that "Example Title - #1" and canonical = "http://www.example.com" would be considered for ranking purposes while the others are disregarded.
My assumption is based on how SE's deal with duplicate links on a page. Is this a correct assumption?
We're building a CMS-like service that will allow our SEO team to change head tag content on the fly. The easiest solution, from a dev perspective, is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements. I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach.
Thanks in advance.
-
I presume that the engines simply disregard one of the tags vs. building a penalty based rule, but because we'll also use this solution for canonical tags, there's just too much risk with the approach.
I still think it may be a solid (simple) test, so if I manage to get some free time, I'll set something up and post results.
Consensus says...don't do it!
Thanks for confirming my fears
-
Hey Shane,
I completely agree, code duplication should be avoided wherever possible. I've found very little recent info on this specific topic so it seems ripe for a quick test. Stay tuned and thanks for your 2 cents.
Stefan
-
While there is no authoritative answer from Google or Mr. Cutts, general consensus amongst my SEO peers that were just IM'd by me seems to be multiple titles on a page is bad. I agree with the consensus.
Years ago, multiple <title>s was a common blackhat technique.This is back when you could successfully stuff meta keywords and it'd actually work. As for now if it would just be neutral or actively negative...I don't know, but my gut leans to it'd be actively negative to some degree.</p></title>
-
Interesting, as I suspected. Looks like they've got a few other issues to e.g. first meta keyword tag was not closed so looks like it includes the meta description.
Thanks for the example!
-
Here's the only example I know of: http://www.kbzk.com/home/
If you go into the source you will see the KBZK.com Title tag, and then a Title tag with their Tag Line. The search engine only recognizes the first one, as well as any browser that you would use.
-
is to simply place new/updated content above the preexisting elements. I'm trying to validate/invalidate the approach.
Others may have differing opinions but i personally would not do this just based off of best practices. The more tags (code) you put in the head, the more data to be read, and since crawlers in general only crawl a certain amount of your page adding superfluous code would not be recommended.
but yes, I believe in theory the duplicate title would just be ignored, and probably no penalty would be incurred.
As to the duplicate canonical.... I am not sure about that one, I would think it would be ignored, but do not want to give you bad info as that could really mess you up if canonicals are incorrectly received by Google Algo.
w00t!
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
-
Curious why site isn't ranking, rather seems like being penalized for duplicate content but no issues via Google Webmaster...
So we have a site ThePowerBoard.com and it has some pretty impressive links pointing back to it. It is obviously optimized for the keyword "Powerboard", but in no way is it even in the top 10 pages of Google ranking. If you site:thepowerboard.com the site, and/or Google just the URL thepowerboard.com you will see that it populates in the search results. However if you quote search just the title of the home page, you will see oddly that the domain doesn't show up rather at the bottom of the results you will see where Google places "In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 7 already displayed". If you click on the link below that, then the site shows up toward the bottom of those results. Is this the case of duplicate content? Also from the developer that built the site said the following: "The domain name is www.thepowerboard.com and it is on a shared server in a folder named thehoverboard.com. This has caused issues trying to ssh into the server which forces us to ssh into it via it’s ip address rather than by domain name. So I think it may also be causing your search bot indexing problem. Again, I am only speculating at this point. The folder name difference is the only thing different between this site and any other site that we have set up." (Would this be the culprit? Looking for some expert advice as it makes no sense to us why this domain isn't ranking?
Web Design | | izepper0 -
New To SEO Management, I just want to double check that my idea will work.
I am new to SEO management. I had a 3 month SEO copy writing internship and a 5 month SEO temp job. In both I mostly wrote copy, but I've been teaching myself SEO on the side, I became Google certified. I ended up getting a telemarketing job and somehow the conversation of SEO came up and I winded up managing their SEO for 12 dollars an hour. They say that every lead generated from the website that turns into a sale will be worth 10 dollars and if and when the sales exceed my paycheck I will starting making commission so long as it stays above my hourly. SEO is very fun and this is like my dream job. They are leaving the planning 100% up to me and I want to make sure that what I am doing will work. My plan is as follows: Part 1: Page Authority via backlinks and social media We are health care brokers and my boss, the owner has a lot of contact. He is talking with large unions like, "The Teamsters," and large company retirment groups like, "Blue flame," which is apparently in some way connected to DTE or GE. Long story short, I am trying to get him to convince them to give us a back link to our main page. He also has a ton of clients that own companies. This is good because they may be persuaded to give us backlinks too. In addition, the tech guy thinks he can implement something where we can get a google +1, facebooks likes/shares, twitter likes and shares and pintrest pin it's that would be a part of an email that we send to people within the list of 12,000 clients. From what I can see, from the client base and the people we are working with we should be able to raise the page authority substantially despite the fact that the site is only a few months old and is not yet out of the sand box. I have been slowly picking off each error with SEO MOZ's website crawling. Part 2: Making a Insurance Jargon Dictionary Guide For The Tri-purpose of gathering traffic, proving our professionalism and helping people understand semi-complex insurance jargon. I could build these 2-3 keywords would be addressed per page and they would be defined in a way to help people looking for terms understand them, while simultaneously netting a strong keyword density and a strong page. I think as far as I can tell there are no issues. Part 3: The dictionary pages will pull in new traffic and the home page will receive links and distribute link juice to the sub-pages. This subpages will guide traffic back to the main page with no-follow links to direct people from the unique termed landing pages to the home page for insurance processing. As far as I can tell my logic is solid and on paper this should work. Am I missing anything (like key details, flaws in my plan)?
Web Design | | Tediscool0 -
Online Catalog (E-commerce like) Wordpress Themes?
I'm currently looking for a Wordpress theme similar to e-commerce/shopping websites like ebay. I'm planning to put up a buy and sell site for shoes where people can upload shoe listings on their own.. The site we're planning doesn't have a buy/checkout button and paypal integration so it will look like more of an online catalog and not a shopping cart. We will just add a contact number/email in the product listing so a buyer can contact and personally meet the seller. Let me know if this can be done in Wordpress + e-commerce plugins. I would also like to know if there's a WP plugin that will allow users to use Facebook or Twitter to login/sign up in our website/platform. Let me know if this is possible in Wordpress by installing a plugin. Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
Does using role="heading" instead of H1 in HTML code affects SEO?
Does using role="heading" instead of affect SEO? http://www.w3.org/WAI/GL/wiki/Headings_using_role%3Dheading
Web Design | | LNEseo0 -
Will keyword optimization for a landing page impact SEO for subsequent pages?
For example, if I optimize keyword “pleurx” really well on our landing page, I'd like to know if subsequent
Web Design | | Todd_Kendrick
pages linking back to that landing page will rank higher than before for “pleurx”
even if “pleurx” wasn't optimized on the subsequent pages. Thanks! -Andrew0 -
Can you use a base element and mod_rewrite to alleviate the need for absolute URLs?
This is a follow up question to Scott Parsons' question about using absolute versus relative URLs when linking internally. Andy King makes the statement that this can be done and that it saves additional space (which he claims then can improve page speed). Is this a true and accurate statement? Can using a base element and mod-rewrite alleviate the need for absolute URLs? I need to know before going off on a "change all of our relative URLs to absolutes" campaign. Thanks in advance! Dana
Web Design | | danatanseo0 -
Duplicate Content for index.html
In the Crawl Diagnostics Summary, it says that I have two pages with duplicate content which are: www.mywebsite.com/ www.mywebsite.com/index.html I read in a Dream Weaver tutorial that you should name your home page "index.html" and then you can let www.mywebsite.com automatically direct the user to index.html. Is this a bug in SEOMoz's crawler or is it a real problem with my site? Thank you, Dan
Web Design | | superTallDan0 -
Title Element length too long?
My site automatically builds a title element basic by taking the forum thread title and adding the board description to it. Let's use a fictional site as "Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums" in this example. A user makes a post titled "Transmission Problems" then the automatically created title would be: Transmission Problems | Gaggle - Chevy Corvette Lovers forums The process seems to be helpful. Overall thread ranking is good. The added words provide value to users searching for information as "Transmission Problems" is too vague, whereas by adding Chevy Corvette the search can be optimized better. The only issue is a small percent of my pages are being flagged by reporting tools with "Title Element Too Long" So I wish to ask, is there any real harm in this case? Google will simply truncate the title, right?
Web Design | | RyanKent0