Duplicate Title Tags Example
I skewered seven partridges on one ramrod, and at table every one of them answered to the same name.
The short answer
- What it is
- Duplicate title tags occur when two or more separate pages use exactly the same title text. Each page should have a title that describes only that page.
- Why it matters
- Shared titles make it harder for search engines and people to tell the pages apart. A generic repeated title also gives Google a reason to rewrite it.
- How a crawler should report it
- Report a duplicate title when a non-empty title is shared by another on-page, self-canonical page at a distinct URL, ignoring scheme and www. List every URL in the group.
- Live examples
/lab/duplicate-titles/a/(positive)/lab/duplicate-titles/b/(positive)/lab/duplicate-titles/near-miss/(near miss)
Telling pages apart when they all share one name
Duplicate title tags nearly always come from templates. A store uses the same title for each color of a product. A blog repeats the site name on every archive page. A template falls back to a default when a field is empty. Paginated lists, filtered category pages, and location pages with one swapped word are also common sources. Sometimes the same page is reachable at two URLs, and that is really a duplicate page problem.
Browsers do not care about duplicates, but people with many tabs open will struggle to tell them apart. Search engines are more affected. Google's guidance asks for a distinct title for each page. When titles repeat, Google may write its own title link from other text on the page. It may also treat near-identical pages as one group and show only one of them.
To find them, crawl the site, collect the title of each page, and group identical strings. Only count pages that are indexable and that canonicalize to themselves. Pages that point to a canonical somewhere else are already handled. Ignore differences of scheme and www, since those are the same page. A title that differs by a single word is not a duplicate, though it may still be weak.
To fix them, start with the template that creates the most duplicates. Build titles from page data, such as the product name, the color, or the city. Add a page number to paginated pages. If two pages truly serve the same purpose, merge them, or add a canonical tag to the one you do not want to rank. Do not stuff in extra words only to make titles differ. Each title should say what is really on that page.