In this post, I am going to look at one of the common SEO (Search Engine Optimization) errors, ‘Title found on more than one page’. What this error means is that there are two or more pages with the same page title within the current site. Perhaps I should first define site as it applies to our portal. Each school is a separate site. The Internet as a whole is also a separate site as is the Intranet. This means that you cannot have a page title like ‘Contact Us’ within every department. Similarly, within a school site, you cannot have a page with the title, ‘Supply List’ under each grade within the school.
Why is this a problem for the Search Engine? I’m glad you asked. It is not so much a problem for the search engine as it is for the visitors to your site that might search on the term ‘Contact us’ or ‘Supply List’. In both of these cases, the search engine would return multiple pages with the same title leaving the visitor unsure in which page they were really interested. This uncertainty forces them to click on each one until they find the one that they are interested in. Now you see why it falls under Search Engine Optimization?
A solution to this problem can be as simple as making a slight change to the page name such as, ‘Contact Media Relations’ or ‘Contact Procurement’ rather than ‘Contact Us’. Similarly. within a school, you could have pages with titles that say, ‘1st Grade Supply List’, ‘2nd Grade Supply List’, etc.
But, that is not the only way a title can be found on more than one page within a site. There are many cases where someone has duplicated a page within a site just to have it appear under two different menu dropdowns. This is a dangerous practice for much the same reasons as mentions above. Perhaps more important, however, is the resulting opportunity to modify one page without modifying the other. In fact, I have found several dozen instances of multiple pages with the same title and different content in various sites of the OCPS portal. Sometimes, you can see the divergence of the content already by the fact that one of the page content instances is clearly from a prior year. Other times, it is not clear which page, if any, represent the content for the current year. Again, this is a case where you should maintain a single location for the content. Then other menu dropdowns should use an External Link page to reference the original content.
An even worse situation exists on some sites in which the content of two or more pages with the same name appear to have completely different content, where it was not simply a case of one page receiving updates while the other did not. Rather it appears as if someone created the second page because they were ‘unaware’ of the existence of the first instance of the page and thus started over with a new page. The challenge in this case is to ‘merge’ the content of the two or more pages first into a single master page, then archive all the other pages, and finally create external links from the other menu dropdowns to the new master page.
Unfortunately, I have found instances where one or more of the above problems affects not just a single page, but a collection of pages. The confusion this could cause a student or parent looking for information creates a huge problem, especially if they are not aware of the multiple instances that exist and begin following outdated information and/or rules.
It should be noted that while two physical pages with the same title will cause a problem, one physical page and a second or even a third page created as an external link page with the same title will not cause a problem. The search engine will always direct the user in the search results to the physical page. So this is the perfect way to have what looks like the same menu choice in two or more dropdown menus without duplicating the physical page contents with its inherent update problems. Also note that you cannot create the new External Link Page with the same name as an existing page within a menu until you first ‘Archive’ the existing page.
Check your Monsido reports under the SEO group to see if your site has pages affected by this issue. Try to resolve the issues described above on your own before either coming to Open Lab or send the affected URLs to Presence@ocps.net.