What does this message from Google Web Developer Tools mean?
HTML Improvements | Duplicate title tags
Your title provides users and search engines with useful information about your site. Text contained in title tags can appear in search results pages, and relevant, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on. We recommend reviewing the list and updating the title tags wherever possible. We didn’t detect any content issues with your site.
If more than one page of your site has the same title as any other, you might see this message. The idea is that each page is unique in terms of its inner content, therefore it should have a unique title to reflect this difference.
Walter
On Sep 25, 2012, at 3:16 AM, RavenManiac wrote:
What does this message from Google Web Developer Tools mean?
HTML Improvements | Duplicate title tags
Your title provides users and search engines with useful information about your site. Text contained in title tags can appear in search results pages, and relevant, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on. We recommend reviewing the list and updating the title tags wherever possible. We didn’t detect any content issues with your site.
How many characters does Google look at when making that determination? The reason I ask is I frequently will use something like this in my website designs:
Company Name | What they do | Page
(i.e. Cardinal Survey | Land Surveying, Planning, and 3D Imaging | About Us)
So, if Google is only reading the first few characters it would appear that the page titles are the same.
I’m not aware that they would be limiting the number of characters that they compare. But you might get better results by inverting that structure a little:
Unique Title Part | Common Title Part HERE
That way the uniqueness would be more prominent, particularly when you have a zillion tabs open at the same time.
Walter
On Sep 25, 2012, at 9:50 AM, RavenManiac wrote:
How many characters does Google look at when making that determination? The reason I ask is I frequently will use something like this in my website designs:
Company Name | What they do | Page
(i.e. Cardinal Survey | Land Surveying, Planning, and 3D Imaging | About Us)
So, if Google is only reading the first few characters it would appear that the page titles are the same.
But, doesn’t the page title help your search engine ranking and placement? In other words, if I started the title with “Cardinal Survey” vs “About Us” isn’t that better for paging ranking since there are likely a whole lot less “Cardinal Surveys”?
RM, this is something I have struggled with too. As an old advertising
salt, I am dogged about branding. The title formulation you are struggling
with is how the brander in me wants to do it too. But we can all see that
search results are truncated to make that formulation useless. What to do?
Simplicity in this case seems the best course – there are so many other
ways to get your page indexed, but the title is how users will qualify the
search results. So why not “All about Cardinal Survey”? Or “The secret
behind Cardinal Survey”. Something that is more tagline driven than brand
insistent.
–
Ernie Simpson
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 10:03 AM, RavenManiac email@hiddenwrote:
But, doesn’t the page title help your search engine ranking and placement?
In other words, if I started the title with “Cardinal Survey” vs “About Us”
isn’t that better for paging ranking since there are likely a whole lot
less “Cardinal Surveys”?