A page title is a short text that describes the page and can be seen in a visitor’s browser tab and Google search (or other search engines). It’s an important piece of information that lets Googlebot rank a page and helps a visitor to navigate through search results.
A page title should be unique for each page and each page URL. If the same page title is used for many pages, then it affects SEO and brings confusion to visitors. It’s as if a few books had the same title and different content. You wouldn’t be able to distinguish between them at first glance.
So it’s good to keep your page titles unique and avoid duplicating them. Now, if you need to check if you have any duplicates, you can use custom reports in Piwik PRO.
Find duplicate page titles
To find duplicate titles, follow these steps:
- Go to Menu > Analytics.
- Navigate to Custom reports.
- Click Add new report.
- Select the following report type: Explorer. We use this type because we need to create nested tables.
- Name the report.
- Choose the Visibility option: Author or All users. The All users option lets you share this report with other teammates.
- Choose the following dimensions: page title and page URL. Drag and drop elements from the ride-hand menu to the left-hand drop point.
- Add a few metrics, for example, sessions and page views.
- In Filter dimensions, set the following filter:
Event type is Page view.
Note: We add this filter to make sure the report includes pages recorded with page views only.
- Click Create report.
- Now select the data range for the report.
- Look at the list of page titles.
- Click on a page title.
- Look through page URLs linked to the page title.
In our case, we’ve got two page URLs,
/product-tour
and/blog/product-tour
for one page title,Product Tour
. It looks like somebody created a blog post with a page titleProduct Tour
that is also used for a page that describes the product. Once we know it, we can fix the page title for a blog post and clean up duplicates. - Check other page titles in this report.
Run this report once in a while to keep the content of your website well-organized and optimized for SEO and visitors. It’s a good practice, good luck.