Duplicating words in the page title OK?
-
Im finding a site with lots of duplicated words in the title tags, I have always avoided doing this in the past, Is there any penalty for having a word repeated twice in the title, indeed is there a benefit from having it twice, IM assuming not
For example: Marketing Services in Milton Keynes | Our Services | TFA
https://www.t-f-a.co.uk/servicesthe word service is repeated twice, in my opinion this is of no benefit at all and is better rewritten to remove the duplication
-
Hi,
While there is no excessive use of keywords, you do not have to have any problems. Always look for naturalness and above all try and experiment. You can read more about keyword stuffing to avoid possible Google penalties
Regards
-
My recommendation is to always test, test, test. Your default should be to test and use the title tag that gets you the combination of best rankings and highest click-through rate. And to find the optimal title tag, you should be testing one's that duplicate keywords too.
I'll give you an example but I'm going to change out the actual essential oil name used so my client remains anonymous.
On March 5th, a specific page was ranking on Google as follows:
- #19 for "catnip essential oil"
- #17 for "catnip oil"
- #7 for "where to buy catnip oil"
The title tag at the time on that page was: "Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name".
I changed the title tag to "Catnip Essential Oil - Where To Buy Catnip Oil | Website Name".
After the page was recrawled by Google the rankings moved up to better positions. Here are the results:
- "catnip essential oil" has been as high as #6 but is at #9 today.
- "catnip oil" has been as high as #8 but is at #10 today.
- "where to buy catnip oil" moved up to #1 and remains there today
- No change in click-through rate
As you can see the results are better even with duplicating the words "catnip" and "oil" in the title tag.
Someone suggested that I should have just changed the title tag to "Where to Buy Catnip Essential Oil | Website Name". That is a worthwhile test and maybe I'll do that still just to see what happens but for now I actually prefer having both "catnip essential oil" and "catnip oil" in my title tag.
Hopefully you can see from this real world result that you can have duplicate words in your title tag and that testing is more important than following so called "best practices".
-
Hi,
In the example you have given, I cannot see the benefit, especially because people aren't going to be searching for "our services" in particular. I agree with your opinion that it would make better sense for you to rewrite the meta title so it flows better.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
MOZ identifies duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title
MOZ has identified duplicate titles - one has' www' in the title. - we have a few pieces of content where the same thing is happening. Not sure how this has happened. Should we do something about this? Will it cause problems for ranking? | KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 2 |
On-Page Optimization | | Substance-create
| KETAMINE GUIDE FOR DRUG WORKERS - free | Harm reduction informationhttp://www.substance.org.uk/harm-reduction-information/ketamine-guide-for-drug-workers-free | 13 | 4 | 1 - 2 of 20 -
Duplicate Content
Hello Moz Quick question. Can I copy and paste a paragraph of text (100 words) from my main category page into my products without hurting SEO of the category page? The content on my category page is so good I don't want to take chances as this is what I will be ranking for. Thanks
On-Page Optimization | | crocman0 -
Page Analysis - Helping Product Pages Outrank Search Results Pages
Hi! We have a lot of our search results pages that have been indexed and outrank our product pages and in some instance the actual product pages barely show up at all. Here is an example query that includes our brand name: http://goo.gl/cgB6W So, we have loads of actual product pages, video pages, etc that should be showing up here, but are not and this is just one example. Unfortunately, there are a LOT of these Search Results pages out there and utlimately we would love to de-index them altogether, but it's going to have to be carefully done. So, was wondering if anyone would want to check out one of our product pages and give any feedback as to what we could change to possibly improve rank or to make them more search friendly or hopefully to help them rise above these indexed search results pages? Here is an example product page: http://goo.gl/2R4IT Thanks!! Craig
On-Page Optimization | | TheCraig0 -
How to avoid duplicate page content
I have over 5.000 duplicate page content because my urls contains ?district=1&sort=&how=ASC¤cy=EUR. How can I fix this?
On-Page Optimization | | bruki0 -
Would I be safe canonicalizing comments pages on the first page?
We are building comment pages for an article site that live on a separate URL from the article (I know this is not ideal, but it is necessary). Each comments page will have a summary of the article at the top. Would I be safe using the first page of comments as the canonical URL for all subsequent comment pages? Or could I get away with using the actual article page as the canonical URL for all comment pages?
On-Page Optimization | | BostonWright0 -
On-Page SEO Priorities: Title's, Anchor Text or Meta data?
**Any suggestions for prioritized on-page SEO work? Relative weights of importance? ** **What is most important from highest to lowest? ** MetaTag Descriptions? Titles? Anchor Text? Alt Text - for images? Anything else? We might not be able to do everything at once like I desire ......but I do feel we should at least get the ball moving in the right direction. I am looking for ideas or suggestions on what to prioritize for a little bit of on-page SEO work on our website. I personally feel that SEO is pretty important but I am a novice. I have been reading this site the past week and want to convince my webpage guy that on-page SEO is important and that we should at least do a few things and gradually get the work done. Rightfully so our #1 priority is to redesign our landing pages (they are bad) . I also think we should do a little On-Page work concurently. (Lack of on-page SEO is also preventiing me from successfully submitting and being accepted by Dmoz, Yahoo, BOW etc) He is mainly a back engine guy and does a very good job with that. If I were to TELL him to do a few prioritized on-page SEO things what would you suggest? He did do something on the home page at my suggestion but that is all to this point. We have over 400 pages indexed with very little on-page SEO on them. Thank you, UtahTiger
On-Page Optimization | | Boodreaux0 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
Meta description tags & title tags duplicate content?
Although meta description tags have no impact on rankings - can there be a negative effect from having many duplicate meta title + description tags with just 1-2 words switched out?
On-Page Optimization | | qlkasdjfw0