Duplicate Title Tags Duplicate Title Tags
When doing on site optimization on a website, one of the fist things to look at are the title tags. For my friends and family which are new to SEO, and want to learn about SEO I send them to webconfs “15 minutes to seo” tutorial. For each factor that one can use for doing SEO webconfs gives it a score between +3 to - 3. As you can see the first item on the list is title tags with a +3 score.
The title of a page is what tells the search engines what the page is all about. Having great descriptive title tags with the keywords that you are trying to rank for will help a lot for your site to rank better in the SERP.
Even once you have the proper title tags set up on your site you need to make sure that you don’t have the same title tag for different pages. There are many websites that have limited capability with their CMS and by default they have the same title tags for all their pages. This is something that you should really try to avoid at all costs especially for your important pages on your site.
Here is what google says in their SEO Starter Guide (PDF Download) if you have not read it yet go for it.
Create unique title tags for each page - Each of your pages should ideally have a unique
title tag, which helps Google know how the page is distinct from the others on your site.
Avoid:
• using a single title tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages
Duplicate Title Tags for Newegg.com web pages
There are many big websites that suffer from this problem such as newegg.com, as you can see from the image below
As you can see they have over 38,000 pages with the same title and many of the pages are unique and totally different, such as about us, product reviews, faq’s and a warrenty page. Each of these pages should have a different title.
Fortunately if you have a big website and you want to avoid this problem, google webmaster tools can help. They have a section assigned to help webmasters avoid duplicate content. In the screenshot below you can see the pages that have duplicate titles on my new website buydp.com (still in beta).
Google Webmaster Tools - Duplicate Title Dashboard
If you click on duplicate title tags it will take you to a list which links to all the pages that have duplicate content. This will help you manage and maintain your titles so that you can constantly monitor your pages and avoid the duplicate title issue.