One of the biggest culprits for duplicate content on a website can be found in the head title tags. Having identical titles on every page or titles that are too similar will result in the majority of your content falling into the supplemental index. By default, Drupal will populate your title tags with the title you give to your pages followed by the site name specified in the Site Information (found at Administer > Site Configuration > Site Information.)

Most of the time this would be adequate. However, sometimes content titles are too much alike, especially on eCommerce sites when you have similar products with varying attributes. In these cases, you will want to override the Drupal defaults, and you can do this with the Page Title module. (At the time of this writing, the latest version was still in alpha, but I am using it successfully on a live site running a stable version of 5.5. However I recommend using the 2.0 Dev version). The newest version also requires the Token module which should already be installed for the Pathauto module.

The Page Title module allows you to customize the pattern structure for your titles, similar to the Pathauto module. You can also customize these patterns individually for each content type. Additionally, it enables you to override the predefined settings directly in your content creation page. Installing the Page Title module does require an extra step other than copying it into your modules directory. You must also add the following snippet of code to your template.php file located in your chosen theme directory.

Page Title for Drupal 6 - I have tested this module on D6 and it works great and does not need the code snippet above added to the template.php file.

Once the Page Title module is enabled, you can change the settings at Administer > Content Management > Page Titles. You are required to set a default pattern structure for your content and your front page. Then you can also customize the patterns for each content type. For a list of all the tokens available for the Page Title module, click on the “more help” link. For example, you could change the [site-title] token to [term] which would add your category to your title instead. If you click on the “Content Type Settings” tab, you can specify which content types will display the “Page Title” field where you can override the predefined pattern settings.

Best practices for title tags would be to include the main keyword you are targeting for the specific page, however, it is not a requirement in order to rank well. You should avoid stuffing your titles with multiple keywords as this is a red flag for spam. Additionally, Google will only display a maximum of 64 characters (yahoo – 110 and msn – 70), so your best option would be to include your keyword phrase once near the beginning of your title.

Keep in mind that what is in your title tag is what users will see in the search engine results pages. Not only is it important for your titles to be unique and relevant, they must also be compelling enough for someone to click on them. Treat them as if they were an ad, because essentially this is the first impression visitors will have of your site. It isn’t enough to have high ranking because this doesn’t guarantee that people will actually land on your site.