How to avoid duplicate title tags?
-
I've got roughly 1200 location pages for a travel client. Since the business does the same thing at every location, the title tags and descriptions are almost identical except for the location name. I know Google likes tags and meta descriptions to be unique, but how many different ways can I write the same title in a 55 character limit? For example, here's how the titles look:
Things to do in San Jose, CA | Company Name
Things to do in Dallas, TX | Company Name
Things to do in Albuquerque, NM | Company Name**My question: Are 1200 title tags structured this way unique enough for Google? **
I have got the same problem with the meta descriptions, but I can vary those a bit more because i have more characters to work with.
Thanks for your input,
Dino -
Thanks Anthony and Miriam, this site doesn't really have a lot of unique textual content on the pages. It's sort of a portal site where consumers can download travel brochures in each city. I thought Googlebots might read the pages as duplicate because the pages are mostly images and links. There's a one or two sentence description for each page (brochure) as well as a physical address (NAP), but that's about it for text.
My thought was that since it's all images and links, Google would have very little to crawl and therefore consider all the pages as duplicates, but the Moz crawl is not considering them duplicate pages from what I can tell. Do you think that since the pages are light on textual content that a duplicate content issue could pose a problem?
-
Hi Dino!
Agree with Anthony that those are unique and that the main concern here is to be certain that your content on those pages is unique. Definitely a challenge with 1200 pages, but fortunately, there should be totally unique things to do in each of those cities, so it's quite possible to manage this.
-
The title tags in this example are unique and are fine.
The bigger concern would be if those pages all have unique, valuable and not-thin content as opposed to being created for ranking a variety of keywords.
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
-
Multiple sites using same text - how to avoid Google duplicate content penalty?
Hi Mozers, my client located in Colorado is opening a similar (but not identical) clinic in California. Will Google penalize the new California site if we use text from our website that features his Colorado office? He runs the clinic in CO and will be a partner of the clinic in CA, so the CA clinic has his "permission" to use his original text. Eventually he hopes to go national, with multiple sites utilizing essentially the same text. Will Google penalize the new CA site for plagiarism and/or duplicate content? Or is there a way to tell Google, "hey Google, this new clinic is not ripping off my text"?
Web Design | | CalamityJane770 -
WordPress Category page title h1 or h2
Hi friends, I know this is a minor technical change, but we are in an extremely competitive market and I don't want to have any points against us. On our WordPress Category pages i.e. http://www.domain.com/category/�tegory-title%/ I looked at the code behind the the Title of the category page, which is "Browsing: %Category Title%" The code is an h2. I look at the posts in the category archive below, and those are also h2's. The theme preview is here and you can click on Entertainment - Reviews to see exactly what I'm referring to - http://themeforest.net/item/smartmag-responsive-retina-wordpress-magazine/full_screen_preview/6652608 I changed the code for the "Browsing: %Category Title%" to h1, which I believe is more consistent and standard formatting. 1. Is this a correct technical on-page optimization? 2. Would it be beneficial to remove "Browsing"?
Web Design | | JustinMurray0 -
Duplicate Content Issue: Mobile vs. Desktop View
Setting aside my personal issue with Google's favoritism for Responsive websites, which I believe doesn't always provide the best user experience, I have a question regarding duplicate content... I created a section of a Wordpress web page (using Visual Composer) that shows differently on mobile than it does on desktop view. This section has the same content for both views, but is formatted differently to give a better user experience on mobile devices. I did this by creating two different text elements, formatted differently, but containing the same content. The problem is that both sections appear in the source code of the page. According to Google, does that mean I have duplicate content on this page?
Web Design | | Dino640 -
Spaces at beginning of title tag - negatively affect the optimization of the page?
For some reason, our title tags have a long space after the beginning title tag and before the text appears. The beginning title tag is on one line, then a break, a tab and then the content of the title tag. I'm pretty sure this is not good and is affecting optimization of the page. Am I correct or is this not an issue and does not need to be fixed? Example: | <title></span></p> <p> </p> </td> </tr> <tr> <td class="line-number"> </td> <td class="line-content"> First keyword</td> </tr> </tbody> </table></title> |
Web Design | | CFSSEO0 -
Is it ok to redirect an old URL to new URL with anchor tag?
Ex. OLD URL - http://www.mysite.com/shoes/red/description NEW URL - http://www.mysite.com/shoes/red#desc Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
How to setup a redirect from one subfolder to another to avoid duplicate content.
Hello All, I have a WordPress site that Moz says has duplicate content. http://deltaforcepi.com/latest-news/page/3
Web Design | | Michael_Rock
http://deltaforcepi.com/category/latest-news/page/3 So I set up an addition to the .htaccess file . . . redirect code to move from one folder to another RewriteRule ^category/latest-news/(.*)$ /latest-news/$1 [R=301,NC,L] What did I do wrong? I am not proficient in .htaccess files.0 -
Am I pigeonholing myself with a geo-targeted titles?
I've got a site that ranks very well in my local area for mobile app development related keywords. We use terms like "NYC" and "New York" in our title tags. However I do not believe that this is NORMALLY a "local" geo keyword. The reason that I believe this is because my competitors rank all over the USA (and even in Europe) for these keyterms, but we only rank in our local area of New York. Is it possible that by including geographic terms like NYC and New York, that we are actually HURTING our rankings in other cities like Los Angeles and Chicago? If we removed these words, could we see rankings increases in other parts of the world? The other side of the coin is that if we remove the "NYC" and "New York" keyterms, could we see serious drops in the local area as a result?
Web Design | | Fueled0 -
How serious is duplicate page content?
We just launched our site on a new platform - Magento Enterprise. We have a wholesale catalog and and retail catalog. We have up to 3 domains pointing to each product. We are getting tons of duplicate content errors. What are the best practices for dealing with this? Here is an example: mysite.com/product.html mysite.com/category/product.html mysite.com/dynamic-url
Web Design | | devonkrusich0