The actual title tag is different from the one showing in SEOmoz
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Hello all
I was looking at the crawling report for my project, I have noticed that there are so many duplicate titles in the "Duplicate Page Title" report, I checked the title tag for one of the titles (for this page) manually (in the page code), and it was showing like this:
<title></span><span>Interviews | TechSparks</span><span></title>
where it's showing in the "Duplicate Page Title" report like this:
Interviews | TechSparksEasyRotator Preview
Hovering over the tab in the browser shows the title as I mentioned first, and searching Google for this page shows the title like the first one I mentioned too.
Do you any clue why that is happening?
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Thanks Paul for your comprehensive answer, I totally agrees with what you have said, I do believe now I have a good reason to ask the upper management to take that decision.
Thanks again for you answer
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Glad to hear you agree with the coding issues. It really is a mess in there, and I completely understand that other factors are causing the issue.
However if you ever needed a good reason to justify spending the time/resources to fix your site here it is: yes I do believe it is a factor in your rankings if for no other reason than page load speed.
I've always practiced the clean house, clean mind principal, and I believe that applies to websites as well. Anywhere things can be condensed for simplicity's sake it will be better. Imagine you are a search engine spidering sites all day and you come across that mess of code. Not only does it take twice as long to get through all of the site's code, but in addition there are multiple and <title>tags. Which ones are right? Are they trying to game the system somehow?</p> <p>There are so many little things adding up to a well coded/seo'd site I find it hard to believe that it would have zero impact on your rankings. At the same time I'm not sure what the overall impact is on your site. To me that all comes down to how well you compare to your competition. If every one you compete with has a site with messy code, its probably a non issue, but at the same time that means in order to get ahead all you need to do is clean up a little.</p> <p>Hope that helps!</p></title>
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Thanks Paul for your reply, I agree totally with what you have said, the site's code is bulls*** at best :), unfortunately editing it is not an option for now due to different factors, what matters for us the most for now is the ranking, does that mess in the code effect the site's ranking? as I showed in SERP, the title shows as it should be, my humble knowledge suggests that it should be ok SEO-wise, what do you think?
Your help is really appreciated
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Hi Muhammad, If you go thru the code on the page thats shows in your google search above, I found multiple title tags in the code causing the issue. You have your normal title tag around line 350(in just normal view source mode) and Then around line 1112 you have a second title tag in the code.
Overall in viewing the source of your site, there seems to be a whole lot of embedded code. I would definitely recommend working on a way to trim out the amount of code being used, it seems there should be a better way. In addition to extending the load time of your site, it makes situations like this extremely cumbersome to debug.
Best Of Luck!
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