Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

Among the negative factors affecting a site’s Google ranking, the issue of using duplicate title/meta tags on many pages ranks into the top five, according to search engine optimization (SEO) experts. Though highly disputed (and hence, highly controversial), it is nevertheless recognized as greatly important. Therefore, it’s something that should be seriously considered when building a website.

Search engines categorize websites with the help of meta elements which provide data on a particular webpage. These elements, though not visible to a site visitor, are inserted into the HTML document. Although meta elements have fallen in popularity since the 1990s, it was publicly announced by Google that it largely uses the meta keyword constituent to detect spammy websites. Other search engines, on the other hand, display the description attribute on their search engine results page, impacting click-through rates. It was suggested by industry commentators that keywords in the description attribute are also considered by major search engines when ranking pages.

To provide up-to-date data, many sites, search engines in particular, use a method called web crawling or spidering. A web crawler is a bot or a software agent which browses the web methodically. When many pages within a website use the same meta tags, it discourages spiders from crawling throughout the website because all the pages might seem identical to it. If and when this happens, a website might trigger the duplicate content filter.

Modern search engines use a filter which removes pages with duplicate contents from their search results in an effort to sieve out spam sites. These duplicate content websites are penalized by having points deducted from their overall relevancy score. If a website is tagged as a duplicate content site, then it’s off to the dreaded supplemental index.

So what is a supplemental index? The supplemental index is the index of results which shows up in the search page after the main and normal results. As of now, using duplicate title/meta tags on many pages and triggering the filter seems the best way to get into the supplemental results. Surely, no one in his right mind would want that

The problem of having duplicate title/meta tags is serious enough to wipe out an entire site from the search engine rankings. And thing is, this is a very common mistake among a lot of websites, big ones included. Billions of dollars are being lost in the World Wide Web over something so basic. If only they were simply fixed, all problems caused by this issue could be easily circumvented.