How will engines deal with duplicate head elements e.g. title or canonicals?

[PCampolo]

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.

[PCampolo]

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

[PCampolo]

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

[MRCSearch]

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>

[PCampolo]

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!

[ResslerMotors]

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.

[Jinx14678]

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!