Lorel - 11:17 pm on Feb 26, 2013 (gmt 0)

I may be wrong about duplicate Title vs H1 tags causing a problem however I've seen drastic improvement when making sure they are not exact duplicates of each other.

Also, when the title and H1 are exactly the same I either change the words around or use a synonym instead, but still maintain the same meaning.

BTW, I haven't changed the titles - I only change the H1 as I don't want a delay in ranking due to title change.

@Tedster Re Commercial CMS programs creating matching titles and H1 by default and Google not having a problem with it. I'm very concerned about leaning on what some software program does by default and hoping Google is sympathetic towards that method, i.e., the default that uses numbers in file names instead of keywords for instance. When Google is trying to get rid of duplicates it seems to me having a slightly different title/H1 can't hurt.

I don't use a CMS program. I write code by hand. Maybe Google can tell the difference, i.e., it sees a deliberate attempt to duplicate title/H1 in my case.