Title duplicates issue means that there are two or more pages on the website that have the same meta title tag.
Why it is important
From an SEO perspective, the page title tag (located in the head of an HTML document) is one of the most crucial content areas, given that the header announces or describes very briefly the content found on the corresponding page. Apart from the fact that search engines treat this piece of content with the highest priority possible, it is used in several other ways, for instance, in the title bar of the browser or as the anchor text of the SERP snippet corresponding to your page.
Failing to provide a title is likely worse than having duplicate titles, however, the latter is still a grave mistake that makes your Page Rank worse than it could.
Google’s advice
Avoid repeated or boilerplate titles. It’s important to have distinct, descriptive headers for each page on your site. Titling every page on a commerce site “Cheap products for sale”, for example, makes it impossible for users to distinguish one page differs another.
Long titles that vary by only a single piece of information (“boilerplate” headers) are also bad; for example, a standardized title like “<band name> – See videos, lyrics, posters, albums, reviews and concerts” contains a lot of uninformative text. One solution is to dynamically update the header to better reflect the actual content of the page: for example, include the words “video”, “lyrics”, etc., only if that particular page contains video or lyrics.
Another option is to just use “<band name>” as a concise title and use the meta description (see below) to describe your site’s content.
How to Check the Issue
We recommend conducting such examinations using online or offline crawlers. Sitechecker’s audit feature can be utilized to detect all pages that contain title duplicates.
You will receive a detailed list of titles along with the respective pages where these duplications have occurred.
How to Fix the Issue
To address the issue, make sure to rewrite duplicate titles where needed so that every page on your site has a unique title that accurately describes its content.
Consider the guidelines below when writing good titles:
- Stay within 40-70 characters.
- Locate your most important keywords at the beginning of the header.
- Push your site name or brand name towards the end of the title.
- Avoid just listing keywords with commas in-between – titles should be highly readable and natural sounding.
- Ensure each header is unique.
- Feel free to create template-based titles automatically by using specialized software (especially in case of big sites) but monitor the results closely by ensuring that headers are readable and make sense.
Check your website for duplicate title tags
Audit your website to detect whether the site has two and more pages with the same meta title tag
