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June 15, 2005
Warning About Duplicate Tags
In the past it has been suggested that you might want to add two or more title tags to a single page since this technique appeared to help a site's ranking for some engines. Several years back we had even researched this and found that it could indeed improve your site's search positions in some engines.
Unfortunately many web masters now find that if they do this, intentionally or by accident, it usually means that a search engine stops cold on the site and resists indexing the rest of the page or omits the page all together from the index.
We would recommend that you follow the normal convention of having a single title tag to avoid these types of problems. Even having duplicate closing / opening HTML tags can cause confusion to a search engine even though the page may be readable in your web browser!
Some engines like MSN even make a similar statement in their guidelines for website owners:
"...Use only well-formed HTML code in your pages. Ensure that all tags are closed, and that all links function properly. If your site contains broken links, MSNBot may not be able to index your site effectively, and people may not be able to reach all of your pages..."
Quote taken from:
http://search.msn.com/docs/siteowner.aspx?t=SEARCH_WEBMASTER_REF_GuidelinesforOptimizingSite.htm
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