Page Title
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Hi All,
I am wondering if you could help me please. I am getting the following result after I run my On-Page Analysis
Avoid Multiple Page Title Elements
_Easy fix _
<dl style="font-style: normal;">
<dt>Page titles</dt>
<dd>"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin -" and "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin"</dd>
<dt>Explanation</dt>
<dd>Web pages are meant to have a single title, and for both accessibility and search engine optimization reasons, we strongly recommend following this practice.</dd>
<dt>Recommendation</dt>
<dd>Remove all but a single page title element.</dd>
</dl>
Does this mean that i have 2 pages that are nearly identical or i should only name a page with one word?
The reason i ask is because i have 1 page called
"Aquashowers-Shower Repairs Dublin"
and another called
"Aquashowers-Dublin Shower Repair"
I don't have a page called "Aquashowers - Shower Repairs Dublin" (with the space inbetween the words and the hyphen)
Any help would be great. Thanks again
Aidan
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It means that your page titles are too similar. Especially if you are using keywords in your titles it is poor optimization strategy to name pages similar titles. When google bot crawls your website it will chose which page is more relevant for "shower repairs dublin" or "dublin shower repairs" since they are closely related. This means you are competing with yourself for rankings by having 2 pages with the same title. Hope this helps
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It is a recommendation based on sound SEO practices but every industry is different. The concern is that the search engine will get confused on which page to rank higher but it is not a major problem. You might end up having both pages on page 1 which would be great for you. This happens often in my industry (Real Estate) where a company will have two pages that are similar but not duplicate, that will end up on page 1.
Why does this happen? Because both pages add value to the web visitor for different issues but have similar titles based on the content. As long as it is done in a way that is for the web visitor and not to game the system it should be fine.
Hope this helps and good luck
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You actually have two issues, Aidan, but the one the SEOMoz crawl is reporting here is not what folks have mentioned so far.
The warning is telling you that the code of your webpage contains two instances of the meta-title tag. The meta title is found between the <title>tags and only shows in the code, not the rendered version of your page. In your case, there's a version of the meta-title tag on line 84, and another on line 97 in the header section near the top of your page. All of your pages have this double-title problem.</p> <p>If you have two title tags, the search engines won't know which one to use. As a result of this confusion, the search engine is actually discarding your page titles and making up one of its own based on navigation - never as good as trying to get it to display the ones you've actually designed.</p> <p>On closer inspection, your pages have a significant configuration problem because they actually have two (nested) <head> sections. Something is adding a second <head> section that contains the extra unwanted title tag. Perhaps there's a plugin doing this? (See attached image of source code - the circled area is code that should not be there)</p> <p>The second problem, as shiftins and Joel point out , is that if you have multiple pages targeting such similar terms, the search engines will likely be unable to tell which is the most important (authoritative) page. They will essentially split the ranking power for those terms between the two pages, making each rank lower than one would by itself.</p> <p>Paul</p> <br> <br> <a download="6vwja" class="imported-anchor-tag" href="http://imgur.com/6vwja" target="_blank">6vwja</a></title>
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Joel/Shiftins/Paul,
Thanks for the great replies. I have a much better understanding now and will change both pages to target different keywords and also change the page title of one of them to reflect this change.
Thanks again. It is very much appreciated.
Cheers
Aidan
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Glad that helped, Aidan, but you also really need to get that code problem creating double title tags on all your pages fixed.
The meta-title is one of the most significant on-page ranking factors and until you get rid of that second in your source code, the search engines will see a duplicate title for every page on your site (very bad for rankings), and the search results pages will continue to make up their own page titles rather than use the ones you've crafted.
Let me know if you need more background.
P.
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