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Page title and slug as complements to one another?
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When creating a page, is it ever worthwhile to ensure that there's minimal duplication in the keywords in the page title vs. the slug?
Or is it more like the title is more like a sentence description of the page and the slug is a scannable set of keywords that describes the page, and duplication doesn't really matter.
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They don't have a specific algorithm for it, but best practice is to keep them as short as possible. When you build your slugs ask yourself if a searcher could guess what this page is about based on the shorter slug. If they probably couldn't, then you would probably want add as little as possible so they could guess it.
The title should effectively communicate it, and the slug should reflect it. Also, remember that the rules for titles is even shorter with one of Google's recent updates with larger titles in the SERPs.
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I read somewhere that Google frowns upon slugs being longer than five words.
Do you try to follow this practice as well?
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First off, duplication doesn't matter. Hopefully your title and slug are about the same topic.
That being said, my goal for the title is to be catchy, and my goal for the slug is to succinctly reflect that. A basic practice you can do is take the title, remove the stop words, and that's your title. No need to use words like the, in, on or a in a link. Just adds unnecessary dashes, and makes it longer. There's always exceptions to this, but in general this is what I practice for good results.
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