Thread: Having both <title> and <meta name="title"...> on a web page?

I have a question about using duplicate instances of title on one web page.

I am working on a website that has 2 instances of title tags on every web page, here is an example of the title and meta tags:

<title>Title of the Webpage</title>
<meta name="title" content="Title of the Webpage (same as <title> above)">
<meta name="description" content="Brief description of the contents of the page">

Is <meta name="title"...>considered a title tag as well? If so, is there a negative affect of using <title> tag along with the <meta name="title:...>? Like the SEs picking it up as keyword stuffing?

So far, the only affect that I am seeing by using the <title> tag and <meta name="title"...> together is that when you post links in a social media site, like facebook, it will display the title and a snippet, instead of using the title and meta description like it is supposed to.

I'm still not sure if it affects search engine rankings and results if you have those two together. I know title is very important and if SEs run into title and meta title, I'm not sure if it confuses it when the page is crawled? If facebook reads the page incorrectly when you post a link, then I'm wondering if search engines do as well when they crawl the page? Like picking it up as keyword stuffing.

I told the web developers for this website that in my opinion having both is not correct and the <meta name="title"....> needs to be removed, but they said that it probably doesn't make a difference because they don't think it affects search engine results and won't remove it just based on opinion. They are tough when adding IT tickets to their task list because they have so many projects. If I do add this task, they want to know the priority level and if I don't have a strong case where it affects SE results, then it probably won't get done.

Anyway, I just wanted to shoot this question out there to see if any other SEO professionals came across this issue. I will try to research this more and find some evidence that having both <title> and <meta name="title"> affects SE rankings and results.

It is the Title that effects search engine result not meta title. So there is no reason to worry.

Meta title tags does not give the same benefits that the actual page title tag gives. It is because the actual page title tag is what would be displayed by the search engines in their search results. And in Google's point of view, keyword benefits from this meta title tag is negligible, similar to how Google treats meta keywords tag. Here is an explanation of the meta title tag for a reference, retrieved from [url]http://www.webmarketingnow.com/tips/meta-title.html[/url]:

[QUOTE]
...
The Meta Title (<META NAME="title"...> Some say that having this tag on your pages will give you a boost in the Search Engines Result Pages (SERPs); however, according to my testing while both Yahoo! and MSN index this tag the results are inconsistent. And as such, it is impossible to conclusively determine the Meta Title Tag's effect on the algorithm.

Recommendation: Either use with caution or don't use. While the Meta Title Tag seems to be favored among the SEOs in India, the SEO boost as a Google Meta Tag it is supposed to give is nonexistent according to my testing. Personally, I don't use the tag as I see no benefits and have seen some instances of lower ranking in using it.[/QUOTE]