Duplicate Page Title

[petewinter]

Virtually all of my pages are coming up with a "Duplicate Page Title" error even though the page title are different. I assume this is down to the end of the page title having the company name. Is this the reason and is it a problem to have a page title like below...

"Page title description - Company Name"

[ZephSnapp]

If the words are different it is highly unlikely that this is the issue.  It might be possible if the titles were (for example) Sugar-company name Sugars-company name, sugary-company name.

But even then it would be a stretch.  Are you sure that your website platfor hasn't dynamically created mirror pages?  This happened to us in Magento recently.  The developer didn't know any better and we had to set him straight.

[petewinter]

Thanks, but I'm still unsure.

Does "Duplicate Page Title" mean the whole page title is used on another page or can it be just certain words are repeated as I am getting lots of errors even thought page title is different?

[zigojacko]

Where are you seeing this error appear?

And no, it's unlikely that if all your page titles are being appended with your company name that this would flag duplicate page titles.

If your website is dynamic, it is likely that your page titles are being rewritten but something is delaying the time it takes to rewrite them so any bot/crawler is just detecting them as duplicates... Possibly.

[zigojacko]

Depends on the tool you are using but duplicate page title would have to be an exact match on the page title I would expect...

[JustinTaylor88]

I assume here that you are referring to a "Duplicate page Title" error showing up in the SeoMOZ web app?

The most likely issue is that you have set your campaign up as root domain (i.e. with no www prefix for the domain), Root domains are fine, however if the links in your site point to www.domain.com and domain.com this will show as a duplicate page.

This behaviour is by design of SeoMOZ as Google will also be seeing your pages as duplicates which will most likely harm your SERPs

The best solution to this problem is to 301 or rel=canonical to the preferred domain

ie: if a user types in domain.com you 301 to www.domain.com

Make sure you do this for all domains/subdomains you have pointing to your site and add the trailing slash to the domain i.e. http://www.domain.com/ as this gets added anyway.

This will stop the page reporting as duplicates, also Google will only see one version of your pages which should pack some rankings bonus' for you.

Hope that helps

Justin

[petewinter]

Thanks for the reply. Your right. I can't see the option in my settings to change from a root domain to a sub domain. Any idea's?

[JustinTaylor88]

It isn't possible to change from a root to a subdomain, the only way of doing this is to create a new campaign, you will however start from scratch on the historical data of rankings etc.

I would strongly recommend you keep the campaign set up as is and use 301's to resolve the duplicate issues, as if you don't you rankings are likely to be hurt by duplicate content.

I'm sure you are aware already, but if not, here is the info for setting up 301

For apache
http://www.isitebuild.com/301-redirect.htm

For Windows
http://thatsit.com.au/seo/tutorials/how-to-fix-canonical-domain-name-issues

As I say, you really should fix this issue as opposed to working around it.

[ZephSnapp]

Facepalm.  Such a good call.  Can't believe I didn't think of that.

[petewinter]

Hi Justin

I have now resolved the duplicate page title as mentioned.

However I am still getting lots of "duplicate page content" errors on all my wordpress tags pages. Any idea's why and how to resolve this?

Thanks

Pete