I've had a question about using duplicate instances of title tags on one web page. I am working on a website that has 2 instances of title on one webpage, here is an example of the title and meta tags: <title>Title of the Webpage</title> <meta name="title" content="Title of the Webpage (same as <title> above)"> <meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page"> Is <meta name="title"...> considered a title tag as well? Is it necessary? If so, what is the affect of using that meta tag along with the <title> tag? So far, the only affect that I am seeing by using the <title> tag and <meta name="title"...> together is that when you post links in a social media site, like facebook, it will display the title and a snippet, instead of using the title and meta description like it is supposed to. I'm still not sure if it affects search engine rankings and results if you have those two together (possibly keyword stuffing?). I know title is very important and if SEs run into title and meta title, I'm not sure if it confuses it when the page is crawled? If facebook reads the page incorrectly when you post a link, then I'm wondering if search engines do as well when they crawl the page? I told the web developers for this website that in my opinion having both is not correct and the <meta name="title"....> needs to be removed, but they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. They are tough when adding IT tickets to their task list because they have so many projects. If I do add this task, they want to know the priority level and if I don't have a strong case where it affects SE results, then it probably won't get done. Anyway, I just wanted to shoot this question out there to see if any other SEO professionals came across this issue. I will try to research this more and find some evidence that having both <title> and <meta name="title"> affects SE rankings and results.
Meta tags are not important for Google, but for yahoo optimization, they play a big role, it may have bad effects on yahoo ranking. But, my advice is try to avoid it as much as you can. It's little bit risky.