Duplicate page titles on Ecommerce

[frankrizzo]

Hi,

My question is in reference to an E-commerce site- Our SEO MOZ scan is showing many errors for Duplicates- such as Duplicate titles -

The majority of these are on the products map- and the page titles are

Products Map :: Company Name

How do we get correct this or does Google not penalize for it?

Thanks.

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Frank,

I think that the link you shared is locked for you personally. Do you mind sharing your website URL so we can look it up in Open Site Explorer ourselves?

Google doesn't penalize for duplicate content per se, but it'll generally hurt your rankings:

• If your issue is that you have identical pages with different URLs, leading to duplicate page titles, your link building efforts are going to be split. Google will only rank one of your duplicate pages on its results page, and that page will be weaker because some backlinks go to the duplicate.
• If the issue is that you have different pages that happen to have the same title, both could rank, but the pages won't be easily distinguishable from each other on the results page. It's much better to have a unique page title so that searchers can see what they're going to get from your page.

Hope this helps,

Kristina

[frankrizzo]

Kristina,

Thanks for the reply- Here are some of the links that are showing as errors for duplicate page titles.

http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=M&page=5

http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=Y

http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4

http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=2

Plus many more..

They all have the page title: Products Map :: Toomey's Mardi Gras

Looking forward to your advice.

Thank you!

Frank

[KristinaKledzik]

Hi Frank,

I would change the page titles to:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | [letter] | [page #]

For example, http://www.toomeys-mardigras.com/products_map.php?symb=C&page=4's page title would be:

Tommeys Mardi Gras | C | 4

That'll at least make them different, and show the structure of your site better. Generally, you want the page title first, then the brand, but since most people aren't going to search for the letter C, I put those last.

But, in general, it's probably better not to have massive indexes like this on your site. The category pages are much better for search engine optimization, and when you have both category pages and alphabetical lists, you're duplicating that content.

[frankrizzo]

Kristina,

thanks for continuing input-

We have an XML site map- Knowing that combined with what you said- It seems that the answer is to just take that products_map.php off the site?

Thanks again!!

[KristinaKledzik]

That's what I'd do. Just make sure to set up a 301 redirect from all of those pages to the homepage, so you don't lose any visitors with the change.