I know places like that myself. I’m always torn about telling anyone about them. Part of me wants to share, but I know that the more popular some of those places get the less special they are.

( For the record, I’m glad the phrase isn’t very competitive, it’s a beautiful place, and while there are five camp sites, we were there most of a week, and had the place to ourselves. I wouldn’t want to ruin the solace you can find there, and in a lot of other places. )

Unique titles are better and I think the reason you’re seeing the results you are is because the phrase is uncompetitive. If you put quotes around the phrase for an exact search you’ll see only you and one other site are using that phrase. You wouldn’t see the same thing if the phrase was competitive. What might happen in that case is you’d be competing against yourself in a sense.

You’re right that this isn’t a penalty thing. It is more about taking advantage of the emphasis placed on page titles. Most things seo related aren’t about penalties. It’s just that it can be so hard to rank for certain phrases that you want to make sure you do what you can.

One thing I’ve been bad about, and got “yelled at” over in this article, is repeating the title across multiple pages. The logic these people suggest makes a great deal of sense, especially seeing how well that particular tag ranks among possible optimizations. But after looking through my logs, I want to point out this doesn’t seem to be something you get penalized for … more something you should take advantage of.

White Horse Falls campground is about the least competitive phrase you could imagine, but people are searching for it, and this is showing up in Awstats as part of this month’s top ten. I just tried the query, and my site ranks first and second for the term, showing two pages with identical titles, from the same campground. I’m planning to reword one of the titles to diversify a little, but it seems like dupe titles is in a whole different ballpark from actual spam.