Duplicate title tags, how to solve that?

[FCRMediaLietuva]

We are currently running the "yellow pages". The problem is that Google Webmasters reports a lot of duplicate title tags.

It's because we have three languages and the title consists of company name.

for example: FCR Media Lietuva, UAB (The same in all languages). Of course we make different meta desriptions and so on. How should we solve this problem or should be just leave it as it is?

[kwoolf]

I feel your pain on this one. But really you don't have to worry much about two or three URLs pointing to the same pages, especially if they are from the same domain and you declare the page language in HTML http://www.w3.org/International/geo/html-tech/tech-lang.html#ri20050208.095812479

Where you might get in trouble is having too many indexed pages with the same content hosted on many different domains. So if domain1.com, domain23.net, etc. all host the same content, or if many domains point to the same IP, then Google might have something to say about that. That kind of stuff raises a red flag. But what your doing shouldn't hurt you.

[JaneCopland]

Hi there,

Are you using the rel="alternative" tag (also referred to as the href lang tag) on the site? This tag will do the following: if your page for "FCR Media Lietuva, UAB" is available in English, Lithuanian and Russian, for example, but all of these pages are meant for the Lithuanian market each page will contain a different tag. They will look something like this:

That is, the hreflang part of the tag says "This content is in English but it's meant for Lithuania." The second says "this content is in Lithuanian and is meant for Lithuania". The third is in Russian but is meant for Lithuania, etc. You can include as many country / language pairings as you like. This is a really handy tag for both countries where multiple languages are used, and for languages that are spoken in multiple countries.

You can also end up with a situation where you have a set of tags like this:

That is saying: "these two pages are the same, but one is in Czech and is meant for the Czech Republic; the other is in Lithuanian and is meant for Lithuania. But the content is actually the same, just directly translated."

This tag is not intended specifically for this problem, but for duplicate content as a whole, where that content has been duplicated for the sake of providing content to people in different countries. As a result, I believe it would be a good tool to incorporate here due to the small amount of duplication as a result of title tags.