Duplicate Page Titles in Crawl Errors (although Google is rewriting in serps ??)

[Dan-Lawrence]

Hi

Im working on a client/project and crawl report is showing thousands of dupe page titles

In the case of the blog/news section its aprox 50 since aprox 50 posts and they all have the same meta-title:

"Brand News | Brand"

as opposed to:

"Title Unique to Page/Topic/KW Relating to Content | Brand"

Since these are the main content pages we want to rank (in addition to the main site category pages) then i have instructed dev must prioritise populating these pages meta-titles with the actual post/article titles, as per the latter version of the above example. (I should mention that i have requested they fix all dupe titles but main content pages are the priority).

Whilst this will reduce the number of dupe titles in crawl error/warning report which is a good thing, is it actually likely to increase the ranking of these news/content pages given that Google does seem to be rewriting the titles correctly in the serps based on the page content ?

Many Thanks in advance for your input

[zoicaremus]

Hi Dan,

Yes, for sure. Assuming that the content of the news pages is unique and valuable.

Having same title gives Google Bot mixed signals which has side effects. Check this post by Rand, I think you'll understand everything:

http://moz.com/blog/how-to-solve-keyword-cannibalization

[Dan-Lawrence]

What i mean is if Google are already correctly entitling the page in the listing with kw etc can further ranking improvements be expected from actually populating the title in the page meta title area ?

[zoicaremus]

Yes. If your website has clear and interesting titles, more people will click on them (as compared to same repeating brand stuff). So, as more people engage with your website, the chance that they talk about your website or link to it increases.

So, this is an additional bonus you get besides the bonus you got when Google Bot understood your content better.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Google is already rewrting the titles in the serps, what I'm asking is once we actually rewrite them in the meta title can further ranking improvements be expected ?

[MikeRoberts]

Even though Google is rewriting the title, it is only rewriting the title for specific search queries that it feels you are relevant for despite not having the correct title and may not always do that for every similar search. So ultimately it is better to fix your titles and rank properly for what you are intending to rank for than it is to hope Google continues to find you relevant to queries you wouldn't otherwise have show for & change your titles for everyone all of the time. If Google still occasionally rewrites them, that's fine... just don't leave your SEO up to Google like that all of the time when its so easy to do it better yourself.

Getting rid of duplicate titles can help but it may not noticeably improve rankings. That would be dependent on how well you're ranking already and whether the title catches the users it is intended for so there are increases in traffic, decreases in bounce rate, higher conversions and so on.

[Dan-Lawrence]

Many thanks Mike