What To Do With Duplicate Titles?
Out of over a million live articles, 13,915 duplicate article titles (only title is duplicated, content is unique) exist on 34,782 articles (3.5%) and we need your help to figure out what action to take.
History:
- November 4th, 2005 we stopped accepting article titles that were exact-match duplicates of existing article titles.
- This was a defensive position prior to our current proprietary anti-duplicate content filters & routines that was receiving heavy development later that month in 2005.
- Early 2006-Today, we reversed our Nov 2005 position and began allowing exact-match duplicate article titles because we now had/have the capabilities to ensure algorithmically that the article body would not be duplicate or derivative of other works.
Why we’re thinking duplicate article titles are a liability?
(even in a world where we know for certain the article body is not a duplicate or derivative of any other article)?
Answer = We perceive that it’s better to have a site of 100% original article titles than to allow a small percentage of them to be duplicated. This is a perception not based on fact; but on belief that some traffic referral partners may give more weight to an article title than the article body and that ~21,000+ articles may be overlooked as not credible (therefore not indexed) even though they have quality original content in all of them.
How to solve this?
Here’s what we’ve ruled out so far:
- Simple strategy seems to be to append something to the article title itself so that only the 1st time an article title is used, all 2nd uses of the exact same title will have some additional related-value text auto-appended to it.
- What can not be auto-appended to duplicate article titles:
- Authors name
- Dates
- Company Names/URL’s
- What should we append to duplicate article titles: _____________________
- Or take NO ACTION as we shouldn’t perceive this as a quality issue?
How do you think we should solve this problem?
Hi Chris,
Interesting problem! I have a couple suggestions. You could take the Title and append a simple number to the end of it:
Teaching Your Dog to Speak
Teaching Your Dog to Speak – 2
Teaching Your Dog to Speak – 3
This makes it completely unique and the actual titles are not skewed in any way. Also, a single number will not have a drastic effect on any kind of title keyword density issues.
I would then probably automate a message to the author that you appended a number to their title, explain why and offer them the chance to change the title to a unique one.
The other way to get around it would be to do an automatic check for uniqueness at the point of submission. If a match is found, simply throw a pop up telling them they will have to change the title in order to make it unique. You may get negative comments from authors about this, because many of them place a truckload of thought into their titles and will not submit until they have a title they are in love with…but if you explain to them the reason, I’m sure they’ll comply. Why submit an article that may not be displayed in SERPs, right?
Respectfully,
Allen Graves
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