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Should example.com/Blog?Page=1, example.com/Blog?Page=2, etc have the same title?

I have done some research on this and SEOMoz's tools say I have duplicate titles and so does Google's Webmaster tools.

If you look at top end examples like http://www.seobook.com/blog and http://www.seomoz.org/blog they both use the same title across all query of their ?Page=X URLs.

So what is the better choice or does it even matter?

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  • They say you have duplicate titles, but is it really a problem?
    – John Conde ♦
    Mar 16, 2011 at 2:42
  • @John - That is the tough part. I am not sure. It would seem like a false positive but does it effect my SEO,I can't really tell! So I wanted to see what others thought/knew.
    – Ben Hoffman
    Mar 16, 2011 at 18:25

3 Answers 3

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Golden Rule #1: Every unique URL should have a unique page Title

Supporting Rule #1: Posts or Articles that are paginated (for whatever reason) are unique pages in their own right, in that the content that appears when accessing that URL is different from the other pages.

Hypothesis: Having different paginated pages of an article/page with a shared title means you are giving search engines fuzzy signals as to what content is on what page.

Theory: If you confuse the search engines, you are likely to confuse your users. If it helps a user to view the title of a URL and have it indicate that it's page x of y, then that helps, correct?

So if for no other reason to provide additional help/clarification for your users you should consider adding the page number (or 'page #' etc) to the title. If this helps you in the search engines as well, then bonus.

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From users point of view, it would make sense to have unique titles for different pages. If user bookmarks several pages on your blog and all have the same title, that's not a good user experience.

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  • Re: bookmarking. It is worth noting that if pages are numbered ascending, items will eventually "fall through" to the next page, thus changing the content on the bookmarked resource. That, too, is not a good user experience :)
    – jensgram
    Mar 16, 2011 at 11:46
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http://www.seomoz.org/blog title: "SEO Blog | SEOmoz Blog Featuring Search Engine Marketing Tactics & Strategies"

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/restricting-robot-access-for-improved-seo title: "Restricting Robot Access for Improved SEO | SEOmoz"

They use unique titles for each article, then. TITLE is used to describe a page, not a website. IMHO the best user experience is provided when you use a well defined, consistent template for titles, for example "title of the page - name of the website" or "archives for MONTH YEAR - name of the website".

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    Right I am talking about seomoz.org/blog?Page=1 and seomoz.org/blog?Page=2 which have the same title but a different URL + QueryString and Google sees URL+ QueryString as unique.
    – Ben Hoffman
    Mar 17, 2011 at 18:03
  • I think this is a mistake from the usability point of view. Page numbers should be mentioned in the title. This is not common and I am a sinner here, too, but my "perfect" website would have differing titles in this case.
    – user6113
    Mar 29, 2011 at 15:50

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