Are ALL duplicate title tags bad??
-
We’ve had some success recently by reducing the number of duplicate title tags on our website. We have managed to fix all the simple cases but there are a number of stubborn examples that we don’t know how to fix.
A lot of the duplicate tags come from the website’s forums. Many questions have been asked multiple times over the years where the user has phrased the question in the same way. This has led to many cases where different forums posts have the same title tag. For example, there are six title tags with the words ‘’need help”! These are being highlighted as duplicates and currently we have several thousand of these. Would this be a problem? I’d be tempted to say that we should leave them as they don’t seem unnatural to me.
One solution other solution we are considering is to append the forum name to the question to any post after the original, falling back to appending the date if that doesn’t distinguish it.
Do people think that this is a good solution to implement or would it be better to leave these duplicate title tags as they are?
Any help would be appreciated
-
Thanks for those answers, that's really useful. It sounds like this is not something to worry about too much, but something that is not ideal for the site's appearance in the search results!
-
I'm pretty sure that Google can tell that it is a forum with user-generated content, so I wouldn't worry too much about it. However, the key to look out for is to see if people are using the user-generated content to spam for their own purposes.
That's what got MyBlogGuest in trouble, and it's likely why Yahoo! is shutting down Yahoo! Voices. It's not anything they did -- it's what others did via their websites.
-
Well, if someone is searching for "need help" you should rank really high. Excellent!
Just kidding. Since your site is a forum, isn't there a way as an admin to go in and manually change it to display what the topic is about?
Second, is it going to drive that much traffic to yoru site by changing these, that you should invest the labor in changing 1000's of page titles? You should know your audience and incoming traffic enough to decide if it makes a difference.
The content is different on each page, so I wouldn't really get stressed out about being penailized for duplicate content, BUT you arent doing the site any favors by having duplications of the first thing displayed in search results either.
-
That's not something bad really. You can have some duplicates titles, but, think the title it's one of the factors for getting your keywords. If you have duplicates titles, you have some pages searching the SEO for the same keyword. But it's isn't bad, i think.
Different is if you have a complete webpage, with the same title at all pages, and title doesn't have relation with content. That's really bad, i think.
Also, for google duplicated content it isn't the same title, it's the same content. If your page is a forum, i can understand you have the same title for similar posts, but they content aren't the same.
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
-
Complicated Title Tag Issues. Experts, Please Help!
Hey there Moz community! This is the first time I ask a question here so please forgive me if I miss any forum etiquette. I am managing SEO for an educational site which is built in React Js, and so far much of the job has been keyword research and site optimization. The site still has slow PageSpeed though. The Issues - 4 weeks ago we published 20 or so content pieces, I had pre-prepared title tags and meta descriptions. But when we released the content there was a programming error that made all of the pages show another title tag for all 20 pages instead of the pre-prepared individual title tags. I noticed this after 3 days and the issue was fixed within 6 days, but by then Google had crawled and indexed the pages. And now I can't get Google to change to the pre-prepared tags no matter what I do! I've tried changing the content, changing the URL of one of the pages, and I've sent Google spiders to re-crawl the pages multiple times. The super weird thing is that the correct title tag shows in the 'navigation bar/tabs bar' on google chrome: But NOT when I view the source code for the page: Yesterday I was taking a walk in the park and I just couldn't stop thinking about it (it is really starting to get to me by now since nothing works), so I ran back home and looked closely at one of these pages in the Google search console. And I noticed something I hadn't seen before… BOTH of the title tags can be found in the HTML: Pre-prepared title tag: <title></strong>UK Seat Belt & Car Seat Laws: The Definitive Guide<strong></title> The other title tag (in src section): title=Ace%20The%20DMV%20Permit%20Test%20%26%20Get%20Your%20License Could this be the problem or what do you think? I've understood that Google has automated title tags and that they can choose their own if they think it fits better, but the title tags aren't even close to describing the topic as it is now so it doesn’t make any sense. All answers are greatly appreciated! Your advice is life-saving for a learner like me. P.S. I love SEO but it can be very frustrating sometimes! Thank you very much, Leo
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Leowa0 -
Duplicate content but different pages?
Hi there! Im getting LOTS of "duplicate content" pages but the thing is they are different pages. My website essentially is a niche video hosting site with embedded videos from Youtube. Im working on adding personal descriptions to each video but keeping the same video title (should I re-word it from the original also? Any help?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sarevme0 -
If it's not in Webmaster Tools, is it Duplicate Title
I am showing a lot of errors in my SEOmoz reports for duplicate content and duplicate titles, many of which appear to be related to capitalization vs non-capitalization in the URL. Case in point, if a URL contains a lower character, such as: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-i as opposed to the same URL having an upper character in the structure: http://www.gallerydirect.com/art/product/allyson-krowitz/distinct-microstructure-I I am finding that some of the internal links on the site use the former structure and other links use the latter structure. These show as duplicate title/content in the SEOmoz reports, but they don't appear as duplicate titles in Webmaster Tools. My question is, should I try to work with our developers to create a script to change all of the content with cap letters in the destination links internally on the site, or is this a non-issue since it doesn't appear in Webmaster Tools?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | sbaylor0 -
Why Put an H1 Tag On A Product?
Why would you put an H1 tag on a product name? I came across this in another forum and thought I'd float it here.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AWCthreads0 -
Why does google keep shortening my title?
IRS Problems, Tax Problems <cite>www.taxproblem.org/</cite> We are a Local Houston CPA Firm in Harris County Texas, dedicated to helping taxpayers resolve their tax problems. We mean, “actually resolve their IRS ... Checking the source code doesn't reveal any reason I can see why they would do that. It happens most often, if not all the time, and only Google results So if anyone would check the source code of my main page and can see why and what needs to be done, I can fix it. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | joemas990 -
Duplicate content
Is there manual intervention required for a site that has been flagged for duplicate content to get back to its original rankings, once the duplicated content has been removed? Background: Our site recently experienced a significant drop in traffic around the time that a chunk of content from other sites (ie. duplicate) went live. While it was not an exact replica of the pages on other sites, there was quite a bit of overlap. That content has since been removed, but our traffic hasn't improved. What else can we do to improve our ranking?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0 -
Duplicate content for area listings
Hi, I was slightly affected by the panda update on the 14th oct generaly dropping by about 5-8 spots in the serps for my main keywords, since then I've been giving my site a good looking over. On a site I've got city listings urls for certain widget companys, the thing is many areas and thus urls will have the same company listed. What would be the best way of solving this duplicate content as google may be seeing it? I was thinking of one page per company and prominenly listing the areas they operate so still hopefully get ranked for area searches. But i'd be losing the city names in the url as I've got them now for example: mywidgetsite.com/findmagicwidgets/new-york.html mywidgetsite.com/findmagicwidgets/atlanta.html Any ideas on how best to proceed? Cheers!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | NetGeek0 -
Canonical tag vs 301
What is the reason that 301 is preferred and not rel canonical tag when it comes to implementing redirect. Page rank will be lost in both cases. So, why prefer one over the other ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoug_20050