How do I fix duplicate title tags?
Duplicate title tags occur when the same line of text appears in the title tag of multiple web pages. When the title tag is well crafted in terms of relevance and description of web sites, it can lead to a high click rate in search results. But repeating the same great title tag over and over may make it difficult for Googlebot to differentiate title descriptions for various pages, reducing the visibility of those pages in search rankings.
In this article our experts explain how to fix duplicate title tags and why they’re essential for SEO.
A robust SEO campaign is vital for your company since it raises your company’s visibility, generates traffic, and immediately affects revenue. To achieve this, strong title tags are essential. Simply put, title tags are HTML components that specify the title of your page sending a clear message about the topic of the page.
Title tags are essential for your visibility in the search engine results pages and the ease with which your target audience can locate you. And your audience will be informed of what to anticipate even before they click on the link If you choose the appropriate title tag it should improve your click rate and reduce the bounce rate. Both of these have a positive effect on your SEO.
Common Causes of Duplicate Title Tags
Below are the several common causes of duplicate page title issues that can impact SEO.
Two pages with the exact same page title, but each page has precise information.
If you find two separate pages on your site that share the same title but contain specific content, you’ll want to give the two sites more descriptive names.
For example:
example.com/business/myproduct.html (Page Title: “My Product”)
example.com/private/myproduct2.html (Page Title: “My Product”)
Although the page titles on both of those pages are identical, the pages themselves are not the same. Therefore, you need to assign the title “My Product” to one of the pages and “My Product 2” to the second page. In some situations, you may need to read through the pages to determine which title to change or if they should both be updated.
The news archive contains pagination pages with identical page titles.
Frequently, websites with news or image archives allow users to simply click on so-called “pagination pages” (/news/page/1; /news/page/2; /news/page/3) to navigate through current and older content. In most cases, they will be embedded in the same content, but tapping on the 1, 2, 3, etc., will reveal older articles or photographs.
These pages will appear identical to search engines if they all share the same page title. This will reduce their link juice (ranking power) and may have a minor negative impact on the other pages on your website. This scenario requires the noindex, follow-tag to prevent problems.
When writing page titles, it is crucial to be specific, use your own voice, and include as much information as possible. If you do this, writing the same title again in a row won’t be a problem.
However, if you used a title tag multiple times the fix is relatively easy – change the repetitive titles. That’s it. The hardest part is identifying which pages have duplicate title tags, but a tool like evisio makes the process much easier.
Avoiding duplicate title tags is a good idea, but on the other hand there are some circumstances in which this is not possible. This is typically the case when several pages, such as single, comment, tag, and archive pages, are displayed during the same time.
If you’re confronted with this issue, take the following steps:
- No index should be used for the Categories.
- When working with data-based archives, use the noindex option.
- When viewing Tag Archives, you should use the noindex option.
- Create canonical URLs for your homepage as well as individual post pages, category pages, and tag pages.
It is important to note that these steps can be completed with different plugins and platforms. For instance, duplicate title tags can be resolved with the Platinum SEO pack if you use WordPress. Here’s an example of an SEO analysis report using this plugin:
The above method is helpful for preventing duplicate content from being crawled and also for assisting Googlebot in differentiating between pages that should be crawled and those that shouldn’t be crawled. After a few days, you should see a significant decrease in the number of duplicate title tags until you don’t have any duplicate title tags at all.
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