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Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
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Hi
I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors.
The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages.
I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this.
The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening.
Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error?
Alex
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Hi Keri
No, never resolved. Thanks for the suggestion!
Regards
Alex
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Hi Alex,
Were you able to get this resolved? If you still have this problem, you might want to drop an email to help at seomoz dot org and have the help team look at it to see if they can figure it out. Thanks!
Keri
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That's the other odd thing - I'm not getting any errors for duplicate page content, just for duplicate page titles.
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Hmm, I can't say I'm sure why that is, Alex. It might have something to do with the SEOmoz crawl that I'm not aware of. It sounds like my blog site is set up much the same way as yours, but I do not have duplicate content errors showing up for this reason in either SEOmoz or GMT.
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Hi Jeffrey
I have Yoast SEO set up to do the same, from when I first installed it last year. The /page/X code is also showing that the pages are noindex, follow.
The odd things here are 1) Google Webmaster Tools is not picking this up as an error, only SEOMoz crawl, 2) the error only shows since 1 Feb.
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It seems what's happening here is that the error is related to posts that are no longer on the front page of your site. When you click to go to see "Previous posts" or something like that, that's when you're going to mysite.com/page/2, mysite.com/page/3, etc.
I have the Yoast SEO plugin set to "noindex, follow" these pages, and I do not get the problem showing up in my campaigns. I believe this is one of the options on the "Indexing" tab. I think it may be the "Subpages of archives and taxonomies" option that should be checked.
The easiest way to figure out is to check this option and then immediate check the page source code of "mysite.com/page/2" to see if it's being indexed or not. If the "nonindex, follow" tag exists, you should be set and this warning will probably disappear on your next crawl.
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