Title Tag Question

I have a WP blog and vBulletin forum. The blog is located at http://mydomain.com and the forum is http://mydomain.com/forum


Would it be better to have the same title tag in both the forum and homepage?

or

Does it even matter?

 

I'm assuming you're talking about the title tag within the head section. If so, yes it does matter what you put there. It's ok to put something similar, but I would try to target different keyword phrases. However, don't worry about getting penalized if you do put the same keywords.

For example, if your site is about dogs, you can do something like "Dog Information and Advice" for the blog, and something like "Dog Advice Forum" for the forum. You should do some keyword research to see which keywords to target.

 

yes sorry, the head title tag.


Thanks for the tips. repped

 

No the title tags would be different in home page and forum page. iF you have same title in multiple pages it may look like duplicate content. And also the title wont be representative of the difference in the type of content in each page.

 

ok thanks!

the guys over at vbSEO told me to make the homepage and forum head titles the same because otherwise "google would see them as two different websites and thats bad"


apprecaite the info

 

That's terrible advice!! You only get limited information to sell yourself to Google and this is one of those places, so why use it spouting the same words?

I agree you could use two completley different titles, but some sites also use this title format:
The Homepage would be: Site Title
And any inner pages would be: Site Title - Page Title
OR: Page Title - Site Title

Which is better, i'm not sure?

Also remember Google crops of the title at 66 characters (rounds off at the nearest word), and Yahoo at 120 characters.

 

"Page title - Site title" is optimal.

More weight is put on the front of the title tag.

Also, no two pages should have the same title tag. Not because of duplicate content/penalization or anything like that but because each page will have their own opportunity to rank for a keyword and they will support each other if they are different but similar.

I 100% agree with steveb's comments.

 

That is probably one of the worst SEO advice I've ever heard. So, based on their logic, if the title tag is different from the homepage, that Google would think that it's a different website. That's utter nonsense. Google wants each webpage to be unique and different. The title tag is one of the many ways that Google would be able to differentiate them.

Google is not stupid. Google knows that the 2 webpages are from the same website because of the domain name.

 

Having the same <title> on 2 pages isn't going to cause the page to be flagged as duplicate. If I have 2 pages w/ "URL Canonicalization" as the <title> then that is really no different than having 2 pages where the phrase "URL canonicalization" appears somewhere on the page from a "duplicate content" perspective. That like saying no sentence fragment can be repeated on multiple pages.

But I do agree they should be different.

BTW: Using site name in your <title> elements is a TERRIBLE idea unless you have a brand that people recognize and seeing your brand name in the <title> shown in the SERPs might make them more likely to click your link instead of someone elses.

Having site name in your title actually makes it harder for that page to rank for its targeted keywords as it reduces the keyword density of your targeted keyword(s) within the <title> element. I only include site name on pages that really are about the site itself like contact us, about us, etc. I made a recent post about my opinions on optimizing title elements if you'd like to check it out.