Page titles
Table of Contents
Page titles
The page title tab includes data related to page title elements of internal URLs in the crawl. The filters show common issues discovered for page titles.
The page title, often referred to as the ‘title tag’, ‘meta title’ or sometimes ‘SEO title’ is an HTML element in the head of a webpage that describes the purpose of the page to users and search engines. They are widely considered to be one of the strongest on-page ranking signals for a page.
The page title element should be placed in the head of the document and looks like this in HTML:
<title>This Is A Page Title</title>
Columns
This tab includes the following columns.
- Address – The URL crawled.
- Occurrences – The number of page titles found on the page (the maximum the SEO Spider will find is 2).
- Title 1/2 – The content of the page title elements.
- Title 1/2 length – The character length of the page title(s).
- Indexability – Whether the URL is Indexable or Non-Indexable.
- Indexability Status – The reason why a URL is Non-Indexable. For example, if the URL is canonicalised to another URL, or has a ‘noindex’ etc.
Filters
This tab includes the following columns.
- Missing – Any pages which have a missing page title element, the content is empty or has a whitespace. Page titles are read and used by both users and the search engines to understand the purpose of a page. So it’s critical that pages have concise, descriptive and unique page titles.
- Duplicate – Any pages which have duplicate page titles. It’s really important to have distinct and unique page titles for every page. If every page has the same page title, then it can make it more challenging for users and the search engines to understand one page from another.
- Over 60 characters – Any pages which have page titles over 60 characters in length. Characters over this limit might be truncated in Google’s search results and carry less weight in scoring.
- Below 30 characters – Any pages which have page titles under 30 characters in length. This isn’t necessarily an issue, but you have more room to target additional keywords or communicate your USPs.
- Over X Pixels – Google snippet length is actually based upon pixels limits, rather than a character length. The SEO Spider tries to match the latest pixel truncation points in the SERPs, but it is an approximation and Google adjusts them frequently. This filter shows any pages which have page titles over X pixels in length.
- Below X Pixels – Any pages which have page titles under X pixels in length. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but you have more room to target additional keywords or communicate your USPs.
- Same as h1 – Any page titles which match the h1 on the page exactly. This is not necessarily an issue, but may point to a potential opportunity to target alternative keywords, synonyms, or related key phrases.
- Multiple – Any pages which have multiple page titles. There should only be a single page title element for a page. Multiple page titles are often caused by multiple conflicting plugins or modules in CMS.
- Outside <head> – Pages with a title element that is outside of the head element in the HTML. The page title should be within the head element, or search engines may ignore it. Google will often still recognise the page title even outside of the head element, however this should not be relied upon.
Please see our Learn SEO guide on writing Page Titles.
