Duplicate content penalty based only on Title and Meta tags?

[lgn1]

First the Overview:

We have two highly successful sites, and have been developing a third in our spare time over the past few years.

After two and a half years, we are going nowhere with this third site in google. Its not even listed in google for our popular money keywords, and will only show up when we actually type the company name.

We had our site added to authority directories such as Yahoo, and have obtained one way links from other authority sites, but no movement.

All our sites are on a Class B network, and even although the general table layout of the sites are the same, the content is differnt.

However I just noticed that the page title and the meta are the same, between the two sites.

And now the question.

Would the same Page title and meta, be enough to trigger the duplicate content penalty?

I have done a google search for several high competetive keywords, and I have yet to find two sites with the same title in the first hundred listings.

So im beginning to wonder if duplicate titles is suicide for SEO, even when the rest of the content is different.

[tedster]

I can tell you that duplicate titles and/or meta descriptions can send a url to the Supplemental index. That can feel like a penalty, although literally speaking it is not. If the content is unique, then give the pages unique titles and descriptions.

[SEOPTI]

I used duplicate titles and descriptions on a few different domains. Most of the URLs have been dropped. After adding unique titles, they came back.

[Whitey]

There's some talk over here on the newly introduced tools @ [googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

discussed here : [webmasterworld.com...]

From my cursory look it's indicative of problems, though not thorough in showing all URL's.

Any site filtered purely on the basis of Meta Title and Descriptions will probably restore inside 14 -21 days, once fixed.

Although this is a great start and likely where you have problems, potentially duplicate content can be far more complex. Site architecture , the relative nature of sites under similar ownership , interlinking of content , "trust" levels of your site could all be additional issues to consider. Plus more and I don't know what those might be.

[g1smd]

Yes. Duplicate titles and duplicate meta descriptions have been a major factor for at least a couple of years.

[Marcia]

And don't underestimate the impact of identical text across page tops, especially drop down navigation lists that get indexed as plain text.