Macy's, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, Fortunoff, Gap... All have their Brand in page Titles.

Interestingly, Gap uses the combination of Category | Gap | Sales Hook (a hybrid of my suggestion and EGOL's) on many of their pages.

I always recommend to clients that unless they're a world renowned brand, it's important to include the brand name on core information type pages (about, contact, jobs, etc.) as the first part of the page Title, but that it's optional to include on the rest of the site - and if it is included on other pages, it should definitely be at the end of the Title string, after each page's primary topical focus.

As for products and categories, unless you've got a site that's dominating the search results, I always recommend Product Name | Product Category | Optional BrandName

This is vital because you need to build topical relevance for every product - both specific to that product and how that page relates to it's larger category.  Imagine having 30 product pages in one category - that's 31 pages that would have the Category emphasized, yet in proper syntactical order for individual page relevance.

Then, as your site becomes truly strong in search results, you can go with EGOL's method.

Always remember that Google only displays the first 70 characters at most from each Title - so look at how Titles would in Google.  If you do include the brand at the tail, it's okay if it gets cut off in the Google display - they'll still see it, and users will see it in their browser when on your site - as an additional brand-strengthening aspect of your site's design.

Ryan,

You added some great additional insight here for Bill to consider.  Excellent work on that.

And yes, I agree with you in not being happy that the "edit" link doesn't want to work lately here.

It's easy to get confused with terminology. All pages, however, should have high quality, unique, paragraph based content, no matter what you call them.

You have the right idea for organization.

From the home page, there should be links to the top level categories

White Tea

Black Tea

Oolong Tea

British Tea

Then all of your articles having anything to do with White Tea would be linked from within the White Tea section of the site.

So the tree would then look like:

• White Tea
  • Organic White Tea
  • White Tea Recipes
  • How to Brew White Tea
• Black Tea
• Oolong Tea
• British Tea

This is, in fact, high quality content organization.  So congratulations for having understood the concept.

Duplicate content is one of many hundreds of factors.  If you have a very well crafted site, highly optimized, and with a very strong inbound link profile, but only a couple pages (ones that are not highly relevant to your primary topical focus) are duplicate, the potential negative impact on your overall rankings will be minimal.

This is true for most SEO factors.  If any single factor has a flaw, but it's not a flaw that applies to the whole site, that single factor is going to have minimum impact on the overall site.

How big is your site?  If it's only a few pages, sure, duplicate content there could have an impact.  But in reality, I expect your site is not primarily made up of keyword phrases that either of those pages would be optimized for, and that you have more than a few pages.  If so, any "negative" aspect would not be severe.

Having said that, it really is best to just use a robots meta tag set to noindex,follow (my preference instead of blocking completely in the robots.txt file.