Negative Effect of Duplicate Title Tags

[Rogs.SEO]

Hi guys,

I'm trying to figure out if one my problems with search rankings might be a result of 2 of my main pages (home page and tier 2 page linked to main menu) have the same title and description tags.

Let's say my keyword is 'building paper airplanes'. The url for my homepage is http://domain.com and the Title Tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".

My tier 2 page url is http://domain.com/building-paper-airplanes and the Title tag is "Building Paper Airplanes I Domain".

The home page is more of an introduction page before the user gets into the instructions on the tier 2 page.

Can anybody advise if this might be having a negative affect on my search results for the search term 'building paper airplanes'?

Thanks.

[KevinBudzynski]

Definitely could.  Always have unique page titles/meta descriptions. If they KW is long tail, you could possible get these on the same page. If the title/description is the same, your ctr will suffer as most visitors will not click a second link with the same info.

Google is all about original content and anything you can do to make the content fresh and different will help Google, you and your visitors.

Why don't you call the first one "Introduction  to Building Paper Airplanes" & "Advance Building Paper Airplanes" or something like that?

[EricHess]

Perhaps the bigger question is: why are you not segmenting your keywords for these pages?

I sounds like you do have duplicate tagging and are not utilizing the additional content to target additional terms. If you leverage the hierarchy of content, cross link, and tag appropriately you will avoid any negative affects.

Anther thing to look at as well, is the trailing slash on the URL. This is often overlooked and could cause even more duplicate content.

[Rogs.SEO]

Thanks Justin - good points.

We do plan on segmenting the keywords for these pages in order to show up for more terms in search. It isn't segmented at the moment and I'm trying to figure out if the duplication could actually be negatively affecting our results in search.

Regarding the training slash in the URL: could you explain a little bit more about what to look out for here. Some more info from our side: when we show up in search, our domain is listed in google as http://domain.com/. However, when you arrive at our site, the url is https://domain.com

Cheers

[Rogs.SEO]

Thanks Kevin.

We currently do show up on Page 1 search results for both of these pages, but we haven't been able to get above 6th position for either (we normally get the pages listed on 7th & 8th position), which is why I'm looking into the issue.

Without any knowledge, it struck me that we might be hurting ourselves (or rather, hurting the ranking of one of the pages) by having both pages tagged with the same Title tags and keywords.

I know there are a huge number of factors involved and I'm trying to evaluate why we are not increasing in rankings (especially as I can see that we have far superior backlink juice than our competitors).

Cheers.

[EricHess]

Nice! Good to hear. Once you segment the those keyword you should see a boost. In regards to the trailing slash.

in most cases domain.com/test will also render at domain.com/test/, the root domain is not as big of a deal, but when you get into the sub folders is when you start to have issues. You will also want to keep an eye on domain.com/test/, domain.com/test/index.html and any other variations that might load the same content. These will all look like duplicate content to the engines.

Let me know if this helps. Otherwise I can send you some examples.

[Rogs.SEO]

Hi Justin,

That makes sense - the duplicate content issue is one I'm assessing on the site at the moment as a result of our use of an SSL cert. We have our homepage under a SSL (https://) and other content on the site is on a regular http://. As a result, I think we may be suffering from some duplicate content in relation to this - when you click on a tier 2 page link from our homepage there is a 302 redirect that brings you from https://domain.com/page2 to http://domain.com/page2.

All stuff that I thought would have been address during development, but the SEO beast needs a lot more attention than initially thought!

Thanks for the help though, and the SEOMoz community have been really great in answering a number of questions so far. Lots of great info.

Cheers.

[SalesLeads.tv]

Hi Guys,

Same Question here.

I seem to have about 8k duplicate page titles.

Reason being is we have listings of cars about 10k plus cars so a lot of them have duplicate names. like Camry 2013 , so what happens is i wanted to know if that could have an effect on my ranking;. and if there is any way to address such thing on word-press , like a plugin or something.

[baddjuju]

Not sure if this is the reason why your pages are not ranking. I am working on a project where it has over 30 duplicate title tags and those pages rank well 1-10 for about 20 pages.

The domain is really old.  Registered since 1997. The website is just as old.