Do the pages on your sites all have unique titles?

[MichaelCorfman]

There are a tremendous number of factors that determine how well search engines treat a website. There are a much smaller number of factors that influence what a search engine user sees when a page from your site appears in search results.

One factor that matters on both fronts is the title given to a page. It is the headline a user sees when your page is listed in search results, and an important factor in Google and other search engines determining what the page is about.

Many SEO experts state having good unique page titles is something that should be high on your list of priorities. In fact, my understanding is that duplicate page titles are a strong signal that two different pages are redundant, hurting the overall placement of the pair of pages in search results.

So, for this week's poll question I thought I would ask how much attention do you pay to having unique page titles on your sites. And if you do pay attention, share the approach you take, and how successful you are.

Michael

[muffincrumbs]

Hi Michael,

I am aware of dup. title content, and I believe my first site was hit with a decrease with this as a factor. I have also heard that dup meta descriptions are much the same. So even not using a meta tag for a post or page when you are using something like Yoast that will auto fill it in could seriously hurt your rankings.

There is another problem with this and that is when people name their site after their keyword, then use that as branding in their title. For example:

"Slots Bonuses and Casino Bonuses - USA Online Casinos" when the name of the site is USA online casinos.

Where as this would be fine:

"Slots Bonuses and Casino Bonuses - GPWA" when the name of the site is GPWA

because GPWA is not a keyword.

When a template repeats this for every page and post it would be not good I think for the reasons you stated. I am very careful about my titles, and often will set a different title tag from the actual posts title to avoid any robotic confusion.

[louie.wilson]

All good on my side.
Yoast is very good to help you do that properly, with the keyword focus, you should not be "able" to create two times the same page title.

[3jokers]

Yeah, this is something I really pay attention to. For example, I make sure all paginated pages for my categories have unique titles. I use the All In One Seo plugin for wordpress. Have thought about trying Yoast on some of my sties as well, but haven't had time yeat.

[louie.wilson]

For having used All In One SEO for a while, and just testing Yoast for a few weeks, i'd recommend to go for it asap. Reason is, I have one site that is pretty old now, and for sure there is NO way i modify all URL. However, Yoast analysis your URL to validate if they are SEO optimized. And when you do that with an old site, it's surely frustrating to notice they are not (not using your target keyword maybe, or too long, etc).

So if your site is fresh, better start right away with unique and "validated' content

[3jokers]

Alright, thanks for your suggestion. As a matter of fact I am just relaunching an old site that had little content, so it might be perfect to try it out. Thanks.

[Jokerman99]

I cannot imagine ever building a page without a unique title. That's SEO+content 101.

[casinobonusguy]

Part of my webmaster job is to go through new pages created by other staff and ensure they are all unique content and page titles.It is easy to slip from time to time in old html websites but definitely this is important.

[slotplayer]

I do have to say it is pretty basic SEO.
in the case of page redirects Google WMT may report duplicate meta title tags until the new page is indexed.

Google will also append the site name if the title is short. I'm not sure where they're getting it from, perhaps the author tag.



If you want to see all your page titles simple type in Google Search site:yourdomain

[TheGooner]

We have plenty of duplicate titles - and it's not really a worry or a case inaccurate titling.

With over 20,000 sports events previews, running over 10 seasons, and multiple previews in the case of major events it's easy to see how our event titles (autogenerated) are duplicated or very close to duplicated (maybe only a date variation - or different writer).

Google provides warnings - but still sends lots of traffic to these pages.

[TheGooner]

Many SEO experts state having good unique page titles is something that should be high on your list of priorities. In fact, my understanding is that duplicate page titles are a strong signal that two different pages are redundant, hurting the overall placement of the pair of pages in search results.

Then "many" SEO experts are making it up - what a surprise !!
If the title accurately reflects your content - then the title is correct.

[sweetbet]

In google's webmaster tools under Search Appearance > HTML Improvements section, there is a Duplicate meta descriptions heading and the text "Addressing the following may help your site's user experience and performance."

While google doesn't ask the webmaster to create unique titles, it recommends the use of unique meta descriptions.

I guess they don't mind duplicate titles, but they do mind duplicate meta descriptions even if page 3 is an extension of page 1 and 2.

[TravG]

The only place I have some duplicate titles is the news pages of my site. It is in wordpress and I cant figure out how to change them. So page 1, page 2 page 3 etc all have the same title.

[universal4]

Travis, any one of a number of different seo plugins such as Yoast, all-in-one or others should be able to help with renaming page titles.

Rick
Universal4

[wettFORM.AT]

I have unique titles and descriptions on every single page. I think it is very important for SEO not to have duplicated titles. The user should know exactly what he can find on the page and unique and well written titles ensure this. Anyway I did not do it from the start but after some months I realized that this could be a disadvantage so I took the time to rewrite all of my pages with unique titles. It was a lot of work but it works out well.