It seems to me that multiple <title> tags is unlikely to get you penalized in Google or any of the others.. I'd expect that they run into them too frequently due to webmasters erroneously (and likely innocently) cutting and pasting HTML by hand to flag a site for doing it. If it was ever an effective SEO technique, I would be surprised if it still had any benefits in any search engine. If I was writing a search engine crawler, I'd either set a flag once I'd seen a <title> or just replace any existing <title> with any subsequent one as I encountered them (as opposed to appending them, if you see what I mean).

tonynoriega

I have seen that as well with many of our competitors on top keywords as well. I've even seen double <title> tags with two separate titles. However I would never cheapen our company or website by using the tactic.

One day the SE's will catch on and slam them for it.

What google shows as the title in SERPS may give clue as to what it does with multiple title tags, ie does it show first, last, both?

I would not try using double titles.

It is likely that one is completely ignored.

One day they will use it as an indication of "trying too hard".

This is what's really annoying. This 'trying too hard' theory. I don't doubt you're right, but when we were just building a site as good as possible for the user, google crawled us, and threw us into supplemental.

Now we're trying to make it 'google friendly'. But I've got to worry about trying too hard.

Life, and the internet would be so much better if webmasters could concentrate on content rather then pleasing google and google could spend some of their pots of cash actually employing people to physically check sites. At least sites that their algo suggests are dodgy.

Relying on their algo for everything used to be successful, but as I've said in a previous thread, the people that don't give a toss about content, and only beating the algo, are the most successful....

i.e. the spammers!

Sorry to rant.

You will be burned and go to hell forever if you use duplicate title tags. Google gods are watching <sarcastic>

When Google encounters multiple META description tags during snippet generation, it only considers the first occurance, and ignores the rest.

Assuming Google gives special value to keywords in <TITLE>, Google would have to store that information apart from rest of the text on the page in its database.

That would mean one database field per URL to store <TITLE> text. In other words, declaring <TITLE> multiple times on one page is completely ineffective, because there's no place to put them.

Anyway, this kind of thing is easy to test.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 12:44 am (utc) on Sep. 17, 2006]

If it is so ineffective why are so many of the top ranking sites doing it?

I can say that i made the mistake on a domain of having 2 title tags in the html. I did not know what i had done, but then i realized that at some point i did the old save as and renamed a page, changed the content etc. That was stupid on my part, but i bet others have done it without catching it. One i caught it, i changed it.

If it is so ineffective why are so many of the top ranking sites doing it?

Same reason many people still use meta keyword tags hoping to rank higher on Google.

Just because many people are doing something doesn't mean its working.

Actually this is a fairly common mistake. Google does not penalize for poor coding.