Are duplicate titles an issue for pages I don't need ranking for?

[RiceMedia]

A client has a load of duplicate page titles on their site.  However, to cut a long story short, most of these pages are pointless and therefore we don't need ranking for them.

As such, I'm not concerned whether any of the pages with duplicate content on them are ranked or not..... unless having duplicate page titles / content on these pages could mean that other pages on the site, like the homepage, don't rank as high because of this.

Do I need to worry about duplicate titles on these pages, or can I ignore duplicate content on pages that I don't want to be ranked?

Hope that makes sense!

[ShaMenz]

Hi,

If these are pages that you "don't want to be ranked" then you should add meta "noindex" tag to them immediately so that they are removed from the index and will not be added with new crawls.

As evidenced by your own question, they are pages you don't care about. That means you have no reason to make them great pages. This said, leaving them available for indexing is a "panda slap" waiting to happen.

I would treat the "noindex" as a priority.

Hope that helps,

Sha

[RDK]

Duplicate content on individual pages will affect your entire site.  My advice: fix it.  Finding a solution is possibly more simple than you might assume. At the very least, automate a title edit that provides unique titles that have relevant keywords insterted in the title string.

There is an endless assortment of articles that describe this very phenomenon, thanks to Google's Panda update(s).

Google doesn't share it's algorithm details, but there's enough observed and documented cause/effect regarding this issue to put this on your priority list.

That said, if you didn't see a drop in rankings through Panda, your duplicate to unique content ratio is probably good enough for this to drop down your list of priorities, but not off.

Looking forward to hearing about your course of action.  Good luck.

[iprosoftware]

We have clients that advertise identical properties on a complex, we train them to create unique titles for each apartment and to tweak the description so that it reads differently.  The content is based on the unique title which will be a searchable phrase. i.e. 2 bedroom apartment in portugal.  Next property will be apartment in portugal with two bedrooms.

As this are exact searches by creating 20 properties all with different search terms we maximise the exposure for the website, as it is very easy to get the no.1 spot on such an exact search.

[RiceMedia]

Thanks all.  I do already have webmaster tools and I'm about to hit their developers with some pretty bad news - hence why I'm asking if this is absolutely essential!

The site is for a relatively large online retailer and it's just a mess really.  I think this is happening is because they have a load of include files in the top level folder, and therefore Google is reading these as individual URLs.

Is there a reason why Google punishes the entire site rather than just the related pages?  I understand they have quality control but this site gets several hundred thousand monthly visits, it's been around since 1998 and has decent Page Rank.  Surely that would override what is essentially poor housekeeping?  (obviously not!)

Thanks for your time and input, appreciate your help.

[Highland]

Duplicate titles or duplicate content?

Duplicate titles are a small problem while duplicate content is a larger one. You should avoid both in an ideal world. Duplicate content should be removed via 301 redirect or sorted using Canonical http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps
Duplicate titles won't help you but Google doesn't discount pages with the same title tag, provided the content is different.

Duplicate titles can impact clickability of your result, tho. Let's say your titles are all "Blue Widgets!", but you also sell brown, black and teal widgets. Even if you get a page to rank well for "teal widgets", the page title says it's "Blue Widgets" and people might not click on it, thinking Google made a mistake. Yes, Google will highlight the content it thinks is relevant to your search, but your title tag is what they will click on.

[CraigAddyman]

Yea it's a major ranking factor so get them changed and unique otherwide the pages you want to be ranked for may be discredited