Duplicate Title Tags/Meta Tags for Website with Multiple Locations

[MainstreamMktg]

I currently have an insurance website that has over 40 offices in Ontario. The site also provides online quoting.
In some of our programming, we have implemented variables in the URLS that will allow the quotes to go to the specific city offices - the issue I am having is that the quote in itself is the same quote form (same title, same meta) because it's technically one page on the website. We did it this way to avoid having to update 40 forms if a field on the form were to change. Is there any way I can relieve my site of this duplicate title tag/meta tag issue?

Any insight would be really appreciated - thanks so much!

[Amiee]

Do the quote pages need to be indexed? Or can you add a noindex tag to them? This would make it that the quote form would not appear in search engines and alleviate the duplicate title/description issue.

If the page has valuable content on it, of course, this is not the method you'd want to proceed with. But if there are pages on the site that link to the quote page that a user would fill out, then perhaps this could be a good solution?

The other option would be to add a canonical tag to the pages.

Sorry I can't be of more help!

[PatrickDelehanty]

Hi there

I would look into the Google duplicate content resource.

How are you differentiating between the locations once the user lands on the quotes page? If it's via parameters, then I would make sure that you block those parameters or slap a canonical tag on each one. Do not block the static quotes page URL, you'll want that to be crawled and indexed, I am speaking of variations that populate dynamically.

Hope this helps! Good luck!

[MainstreamMktg]

Thanks for your reply Patrick,

Each location has it's own individual page (and all URL's are unique), but all locations share the quote forms through parameters. Each quote page already has canonical implemented and I've reviewed URL parameters through WMT and it says it isn't experiencing problems with coverage of the site. The only way I found out about the duplicate title tag issue was through Moz's crawl.

For example:

The main quote page is www.site.com/online-auto-quote
And a variable found would be: www.site.com/online-auto-quote/?location=London

Moz Crawl is telling me I have a duplicate page title - the URL's look good.

It's the same quote but because the user has indicated they want an auto quote for London when the form is submitted it will send to the appropriate office.

[RuthBurrReedy]

Are individual versions of the quote form being indexed? Do they come up in a site: search of the website? Are individual quote form URLs serving as landing pages for organic traffic? If not, you are probably good to go. It doesn't sound to me like your current situation is much to worry about.