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
-
MOZ is showing that I have non- indexed blog tag posts are they supposed to be nonindexed. My articles are indexed just not the blog tags that take you to other similar articles do I need to fix this or is it ok?
MOZ is showing that my blog post tags are not indexed my question is should they be indexed? my articles are indexed just not the tags that take you to posts that are similar. Do I need to fix this or not? Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Tyler58910 -
Competition site with Duplicate Name
I have a client who is in real estate and one of his competition used the same Name and Domain and added the word Toronto in front. The competition is putting similar content on the website. The competition also hijacked the Google listing since they both work in the same building. Is this going to affect the ranking our website? What negative effect will it put on our website?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KaranX0 -
Duplicate Content Errors new website. How do you know which page to put the rel canonical tag on?
I am having problems with duplicate content. This is a new website and all the pages have the same page and domain rank, the following is an example of the homepage. How do you know which page to use the canonical tag on? http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php http://medresourcesupply.com/ Would this be the correct way to use this? Here is another example where Moz says these are duplicates. I can't figure out why because they have different url's and content. http://medresourcesupply.com/clutching_at_the_throat http://medresourcesupply.com/index.php?src=gendocs&ref=detailed_specfications &category=Main
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | artscube.biz0 -
Duplicate content - how to diagnose duplicate content from another domain before publishing pages?
Hi, 🙂 My company is having new distributor contract, and we are starting to sell products on our own webshop. Bio-technology is an industry in question and over 1.000 products. Writing product description from scratch would take many hours. The plan is to re-write it. With permission from our contractors we will import their 'product description' on our webshop. But, I am concerned being penalies from Google for duplicate content. If we re-write it we should be fine i guess. But, how can we be sure? Is there any good tool for comparing only text (because i don't want to publish the pages to compare URLs)? What else should we be aware off beside checking 'product description' for duplicate content? Duplicate content is big issue for all of us, i hope this answers will be helpful for many of us. Keep it hard work and thank you very much for your answers, Cheers, Dusan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chemometec0 -
Canonical tag usage.
I have added canonical tags to all my pages, yet I just don't know if I have used them correctly - do you have any ideas on this. My url is http://www.waspkilluk.co.uk
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | simonberenyi0 -
Canonical Meta Tag
Can someone explain how this works and how necessary is it? For example, I have a new client, who is ranking WITHOUT the www in their domain, but they have a good deal of backlinks already that have www in it. When I set up google webmaster tools I made 2, one for WWW and one for WITHOUT and there are diffenet numbers of backlinks for each. I have no idea what do about this or if I should even do anything. Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TheGrid0 -
What constitutes duplicate content?
I have a website that lists various events. There is one particular event at a local swimming pool that occurs every few months -- for example, once in December 2011 and again in March 2012. It will probably happen again sometime in the future too. Each event has its own 'event' page, which includes a description of the event and other details. In the example above the only thing that changes is the date of the event, which is in an H2 tag. I'm getting this as an error in SEO Moz Pro as duplicate content. I could combine these pages, since the vast majority of the content is duplicate, but this will be a lot of work. Any suggestions on a strategy for handling this problem?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChatterBlock0 -
Google Author Biography Tag-Why Should I Pay Attention To The Author Biography Tag
Hello, I've reading all about Google's Author Biography tag but I am not sure how I can use this in my business. Can anyone explain ( in plain simple English) how I can leverage this tag? Is there any implications in SEO and higher rankings? Just trying to wrap my head around this concept and why it's important...or not. Thanks, Bill
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | wparlaman0