Duplicate Titles Shown in Moz Analytics

[socialengaged]

Hello,

My Moz analytics show over 50 duplicate titles. This because my website title is shown on each page (eg About us | Social Engagement, Contact us | Social Engagement, etc.)

Is this really an error to be fixed, that otherwise will impact rankings? Or can I leave it as it is? I don't mind having my website title on each page, but if its worth removing it due to duplicate issues impacting ranking, I will remove

In this case, does someone have any suggestion on how to do this? Which files should I modify? (Im using Wordpress CMS, and I dont see each page code)

Thanks in advance.
Regards,

Eugenio | Social Engagement (http://socialengagement.it)

[Sarbs]

Hi Eugenio,

Without seeing the Moz reports not totally sure what you are seeing there but if they are as you described they pose no problem, i.e 'page | Brand'.

I took a quick look on Screaming frog however and think i may know what Moz is reporting as i can see a lot of Duplicate titles being caused by the fact you have two versions of each page on two different subdomains

• /en/tag/{Page}
• /en/{Page}

And another few where there is a /{page} and /en/{page}. I thought you may have solved it with Canonical tags as i can see them in the reports to but they just seem to be refering the same pages back to themselve (Not an issue in itself)

I would suggest then this may be the root cause of what you are seeing and should try to take a look at these, Heres a few resources on Dupe content, not sure how familiar or not you are with it, appologies if i am telling you stuff you allready know.

• Which page is canonical (Moz)
• Dupe Content (Webmaster help)
• Common SEO problems and how to fix (Moz, lot of focus on dupe content)

Thanks, Tom.

[Chris.Menke]

Social,

I think of title tags as sort of like a magnifying glass that Google looks through to see the rest of the words on your page. When the words in the title tag correspond closely with the rest of the words on the page, it may create just enough focus (relevance) to permit the page rank well for a keyword used in the title.

However, if a second or third or fourth page on the site has the same title tag, then those pages would have to have the same page copy as the first if they were to rank as well as the first.  Since that would be duplicate content, however, they could never actually make it to the top of the search results.

Two things: 1.) Unique page titles help a page to rank for the unique keyword focus it was optimized for. 2.) Many identical page titles on a site may lower the overall quality and ranking ability on the site in general.

That's all to say you're better off with unique page titles for each page.

[danwebman]

Hi,

I think if you look into the duplicate titles problem you may find that it's nothing to do with your brand being in the title, it may be that your domain is being seen with and without the WWW as 2 separate pages.

You will need to make a descision wether to go with www or not.

A simple redirect on one to the other should fix this.

Regards

[socialengaged]

Hello,

Thanks everyone for replies.

Dave, I already choose a preferred domain

Chris, thanks for the useful tip. I think I already got penalized for this (eg I have 3 blog posts all with the keywords "website ranking" in the url, all for different seo strategies, and only one page is ranked for those keywords). I think i only could 301 redirect, but at the moment, I will leave it as it is, and be more careful in the future.

Tuzzel, thanks, your reply really helped also. I have seen in the Google guide you posted that I should use top domains for translations. This is not possible at the moment. Then you suggested to use canonical tags. Does it mean I should 301 redirect all translated pages to the original ones?

[socialengaged]

I have a plugin for wordpress for language translation. I will try to deactivate it, and see if ranking goes up at least a bit. If it does, it means the plugin and /en urls caused the duplicate issues, and maybe also a drop in rankings.. I will let you know the results, if you are interested

Thanks again to all for help!

[Sarbs]

No worries. A canonical is not the same as a 301 however. You should be able to keep the translated pages and allow users to view them, a canonical will signal to search engines only that these pages are the same. A 301 will redirect users to one version of the page too which removes the value of the translated content for your users.

Here's another Q&A thread i was involved in yesterday focusing on Cannonical tags that should make this clearer.

Please do keep me posted, always interested in the outcomes.

Thanks, Tom.

[socialengaged]

Hello Tuzzel,

Thanks again you clarified me many doubts I will keep you updated, I will amend those issues by today.

Do you think is more wise and better to try first deactivating the plugin, and after checking if there is any result, reactivate it and have canonicals for all /en pages? Or is better just to use canonical directly?

Thanks

[Sarbs]

Depends how integral that plugin is to your site. I personally would go straight for the cannonicals but is you can afford to turn it off and experiment then why not. Experimentation is the only way we really find things out in this industry.

[socialengaged]

Hello Tuzel,

Thank you again for your help. Plugin could not be deactivated as it left translation and original all in one page.

I found out that I could also use this code in the header.php of the website

Hope it will work, seems less strong than canonical, maybe better try with this first