Page Title
-
Hi All,
I am wondering if you could help me please. I am getting the following result after I run my On-Page Analysis
Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements
_Easy fix _
<dl style="font-style: normal;">
<dt>Page titles</dt>
<dd>"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin -" and "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin"</dd>
<dt>Explanation</dt>
<dd>Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>Remove all but a single page title element.</dd>
</dl>
Does this mean that i have 2 pages that are nearly identical or i should only name a page with one word?
The reason i ask is because i have 1 page called
"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin"
and another called
"Aquashowers-Dublin Shower Repair"
I don't have a page called "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin" (with the space inbetween the words and the hyphen)
Any help would be great. Thanks again
Aidan
-
Glad that helped, Aidan, but you also really need to get that code problem creating double title tags on all your pages fixed.
The meta-title is one of the most significant on-page ranking factors and until you get rid of that second in your source code, the search engines will see a duplicate title for every page on your site (very bad for rankings), and the search results pages will continue to make up their own page titles rather than use the ones you've crafted.
Let me know if you need more background.
P.
-
Joel/Shiftins/Paul,
Thanks for the great replies. I have a much better understanding now and will change both pages to target different keywords and also change the page title of one of them to reflect this change.
Thanks again. It is very much appreciated.
Cheers
Aidan
-
You actually have two issues, Aidan, but the one the SEOMoz crawl is reporting here is not what folks have mentioned so far.
The warning is telling you that the code of your webpage contains two instances of the meta-title tag. The meta title is found between the <title>tags and only shows in the code, not the rendered version of your page. In your case, there's a version of the meta-title tag on line 84, and another on line 97 in the header section near the top of your page. All of your pages have this double-title problem.</p> <p>If you have two title tags, the search engines won't know which one to use. As a result of this confusion, the search engine is actually discarding your page titles and making up one of its own based on navigation - never as good as trying to get it to display the ones you've actually designed.</p> <p>On closer inspection, your pages have a significant configuration problem because they actually have two (nested) <head> sections. Something is adding a second <head> section that contains the extra unwanted title tag. Perhaps there's a plugin doing this? (See attached image of source code - the circled area is code that should not be there)</p> <p>The second problem, as shiftins and Joel point out , is that if you have multiple pages targeting such similar terms, the search engines will likely be unable to tell which is the most important (authoritative) page. They will essentially split the ranking power for those terms between the two pages, making each rank lower than one would by itself.</p> <p>Paul</p> <br> <br> <a download="6vwja" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://imgur.com/6vwja" target="_blank">6vwja</a></title>
-
It is a recommendation based on sound SEO practices but every industry is different. The concern is that the search engine will get confused on which page to rank higher but it is not a major problem. You might end up having both pages on page 1 which would be great for you. This happens often in my industry (Real Estate) where a company will have two pages that are similar but not duplicate, that will end up on page 1.
Why does this happen? Because both pages add value to the web visitor for different issues but have similar titles based on the content. As long as it is done in a way that is for the web visitor and not to game the system it should be fine.
Hope this helps and good luck
-
It means that your page titles are too similar. Especially if you are using keywords in your titles it is poor optimization strategy to name pages similar titles. When google bot crawls your website it will chose which page is more relevant for "shower repairs dublin" or "dublin shower repairs" since they are closely related. This means you are competing with yourself for rankings by having 2 pages with the same title. Hope this helps
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
-
Keyword ranking for different page than the page optimized
I have optimized "equipment trailer for rent" on this page: http://www.bigtrailerrentals.com/flatbed-trailer-rentals/equipment-deckover. I'm wondering if anyone can tell me why Google has chosen to rank the keyword phrase for this page: http://www.bigtrailerrentals.com/flatbed-trailer-rentals/equipment-24 This is just one example. It has happened on several of my pages / keywords.
On-Page Optimization | | BigTrailerRentals0 -
Is this (title) keyword stuffing?
"Animated Explainer Videos by Wick Video" "Video" is used twice. Could this hurt us?
On-Page Optimization | | WickVideo0 -
Why is my contact us page ranking higher than my home page?
Hello, It doesn't matter what keyword I put into Google (when I'm not signed in and have cleaned down my browsing history) the contact us page ranks higher than the home page. I'm not sure why this is, the home page has a higher page authority, more links and more social media shares, the website is an established one. When I have checked Google Analytics my home page gets more people landing on it than the contact us page. It looks like people are ignoring the contact us page and scrolling down until they find the home page. I'd appreciate any help or advice you might have. Thank you.
On-Page Optimization | | mblsolutions2 -
Description tag not showing in the SERPs because page is blocked by Robots, but the page isn't blocked. Any help?
While checking some SERP results for a few pages of a site this morning I noticed that some pages were returning this message instead of a description tag, A description for this result is not avaliable because of this site's robot.s.txt The odd thing is the page isn't blocked in the Robots.txt. The page is using Yoast SEO Plugin to populate meta data though. Anyone else had this happen and have a fix?
On-Page Optimization | | mac22330 -
10 Mobile Pages. 5 Desktop Pages. Canonnical to where?
I have a mobile site with more pages than the desktop site. Normally I would just point the page equivalents to the desktop site using the rel canonnical tag. What about the 5 pages? Do I just leave them be? Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | Imajery0 -
Locating Duplicate Pages
Hi, Our website consists of approximately 15,000 pages however according to our Google Webmaster Tools account Google has around 26,000 pages for us in their index. I have run through half a dozen sitemap generators and they all only discover the 15,000 pages that we know about. I have also thoroughly gone through the site to attempt to find any sections where we might be inadvertently generating duplicate pages without success. It has been over six months since we did any structural changes (at which point we did 301's to the new locations) and so I'd like to think that the majority of these old pages have been removed from the Google Index. Additionally, the number of pages in the index doesn't appear to be going down by any discernable factor week on week. I'm certain it's nothing to worry about however for my own peace of mind I'd like to just confirm that the additional 11,000 pages are just old results that will eventually disappear from the index and that we're not generating any duplicate content. Unfortunately there doesn't appear to be a way to download a list of the 26,000 pages that Google has indexed so that I can compare it against our sitemap. Obviously I know about site:domain.com however this only returned the first 1,000 results which all checkout fine. I was wondering if anybody knew of any methods or tools that we could use to attempt to identify these 11,000 extra pages in the Google index so we can confirm that they're just old pages which haven’t fallen out of the index yet and that they’re not going to be causing us a problem? Thanks guys!
On-Page Optimization | | ChrisHolgate0 -
Duplicate page content,
Hi, in my campaign crawls diagnostic, I have a lot of Duplicate page content, but we use canonicalization and I used webmastertool to make sure the campaign parameters are not consider by the Google bot. Can you see what could be my problem, or do you have a tip for me or things to look at ? Thank You VB
On-Page Optimization | | Vale70 -
Duplicate Page Titles?
I'm running a campaign report within SEOmoz & am getting 9 pages that appear on this report. They all happen to be our author pages www.example.com//author/admin We have multiple authors. Is there a proper way that I should take care of this? Also as a side note, I'm using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, is there a setting on their I should change that will fix this issue? Or is it an issue at all? Thanks, BJ
On-Page Optimization | | seointern0