Duplicate page titles and hreflang tags

[ahyde]

Moz is flagging a lot of pages on our site which have duplicate page titles. 99% of these are international pages which hreflang tags in the sitemap.

Do I need to worry about this? I assumed that it wasn't an issue given the use of hreflang. And if that's the case, why is Moz flagging them as an issue?

Thanks.

[MattAntonino]

We're all students of the game. I hope I never stop learning about marketing.

I had read about the sitemap implementation but never tried it. Then I ran into an enterprise client who has over 40,000 indexed pages & 20 separate languages.

One of the languages didn't have a subfolder but all the rest did. Instead of coding it in, I figured my way through sitemaps & thought it was SO much easier in the end. I've used it a few times since and it's great.

[PatrickDelehanty]

I updated my first answer to point out my error - thanks again!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi everyone

Oh wow! I can't believe I missed that! I stand 100% corrected - thanks so much guys, I am sorry about that!

Looks like you should be all good then!

Thanks again for pointing this out - cheers everyone

[MattAntonino]

No, you don't need to worry. If you've implemented hreflang into the sitemap properly, it will work and you don't have to worry about the Moz reading. Moz tries to cover off the main things that affect you and give you an indication of what Google may like & dislike on your site but by no means are the implementations of everything exactly the same. So yes, Google will understand your 'duplicate' page titles are not.

@Patrick - you can definitely implement hreflang in sitemap. I was surprised when I saw that the first time, too, but I've tried it for a few clients lately and it works well.

[ahyde]

Hi,

I'm fairly sure you can put the tags in a sitemap rather than the header.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/2620865?hl=en https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en

Placing the tags into the header is a much bigger technical issue for us at present.

Cheers

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

Are you saying that your hreflang tags are in your sitemap? If that's the case, that's not the proper implementation. THIS IS IN FACT NOT CORRECT AS POINTED OUT BY ahyde & MattAntonino BELOW

These tags are supposed to live in the tag of the page(s) which are region and language targeted.

I would read into hreflang tags and make sure that you have the proper implementation. You should also look at language tags for Bing.

I would also take a look at this chart for guidance and make sure that your international pages have language/region specific content - if you're not changing the language, then the tag isn't really necessary. I would instead focus on canonical tags, setting up Webmaster Tools accounts for each region variation directory or subdomain, and country targeting those profiles to their separate regions in Google and Bing Webmaster Tools.

I would also take a look at the following resources as well:
International SEO (Moz)
The International SEO Checklist (Moz)

Let me know if this helps - I hope I am understanding - good luck!