Duplicate Title question

[hawkvt1]

Thanks Mozzers in advance for any insight into what I'm sure is a basic SEO question.

I'm working with a resort in the great state of Maine.  Their home page title reads Maine Resorts, Resorts in Maine, (company name).

The site has about 400 URL's and over half of the URL's utilize the first keyword phrase of the home page title, "Maine Resorts."  Predominately, I find them used on the Accommodations pages (pages that describe each room with a picture) which I would label as deeper pages and non-conversion type pages.  The page titles themselves are not exact duplicates of the Home Page Title but might read something like "Maine Resorts, Company Name, Accommodation Listing."

My concern is that the heavy use of "Maine Resorts" as the first phrase in over 200 plus pages might be competing against the home page and pulling the home page ranking down.

Thanks for any help given!

[hawkvt1]

Thanks guys!  Your help is really appreciated.  When I took the site over I thought, "man, 200 pages eating into the home page."  In some respects this is true but your answers have provided me with a couple ways of fixing this.  Fantastic, gotta love MOZ!

[EnhancedPath]

What you seem to be addressing in your question is the value (or lack thereof) of having the term "Maine Resorts" as the first term in many of the sites titles. As you suspected, there is little value in doing so, but including "Maine Resorts" somewhere (just not at the start) of those titles is not necessarily a bad idea.

What would be more valuable, would be to use that first position for the targeted keyword(s) of that page. So for the "Accommodation Listing" page:

Accommodation Listing, Maine Resorts, [company name]

Think of a user searching for:

accommodation listings for Maine resorts

Now your Google, which of these two  pages do you return (if based on title alone)?

• Maine Resorts, [company name], Accommodation Listing
• Accommodation Listing, Maine Resorts, [company name]

So, If you have a homepage that focuses on "Maine Resorts" as a term, than having the term as the first term works in that case:

Maine Resorts, [company name]

Sounds like your titles are already unique, it's just a matter of tweaking them to be more valuable

[RyanKent]

Each page should have a unique title. It is ok to duplicate the site name such as

Contact Us | Maine Resorts

Reservations | Maine Resorts

The title of the page itself should otherwise be unique. It is also ok to have a partial match but the full title should never be duplicated. For example the following titles would not be considered as duplicates:

Cabins

Log Cabins

Cabin Retreats

If any page has the exact title as another page, it would be considered as a duplicate title and should be corrected.