We have over 3000 duplicate page titles, please help!
-
Hi, we did a crawl report and have over 3000 duplicate page titles. I'm not sure why this is happening... could it be because we have put posts in multiple categories? Can anyone help us with a quick fix? our site is www.stayathomemum.com.au
thank you kindly,
Chris
-
Hey
No problem at all. I would check out the All in One SEO config page, see if it can implement the rel=prev and rel=next tags, if not, switch to Yoast SEO or utilise some other plugin that will do the job.
Also, the SEOMoz tool does not work with canonical URLs as of yet so this can generate some more false positives.
All in all, not a big issue and one that is easy to solve.
all the best!
Marcus -
Marcus,
thank you for your in-depth and logical reply!
Most of our traffic is mobile so i'll take that into account.
cheers!
-
Hey Chris
I can see this is a WordPress site so it may be that you have nothing to worry about. A few examples would be helpful so we can see if this is effecting various types of pages (posts / pages / categories / tags) but I can likely give you some pointers with a quick dig into the source.
So, assuming it is the SEOMoz tool that is telling you that you have duplicate page titles lets have a look at the site and some examples.
So, WordPress is organised by various taxonomies including category, tag, author and date. Any of these pages can have a primary page and then additional pages when there are too many posts in a given section.
Lets have a look at an example: Recipes > Deserts
http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/desserts/
Desserts | Stay at Home Mum - Survive and Thrive on One Wage
This section has several sub categories for older posts all with a very similar page title:
http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/desserts/page/2/
Desserts | Stay at Home Mum - Survive and Thrive on One Wage - Part 2
Now, this is not exactly the same as we have ' - Part 2' at the end (page 2 would be better maybe?) but where you have a large site like this, with hundreds of categories, it does not take long for all of those categories to get several sub pages and to generate a whole bunch of similar or duplicate page titles.
Now, Google generally understands this but there are some simple ways to deal with this that can help them better understand your site. One of these is the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags. These tags exist to help indicate that a page is part of a paginated series as your category pages are.
The net result of this approach is that any indexing power is concentrate on the first page in the group so any links picked up by page 2, 3 etc are all allocated to the first page in the sequence.
Alternative - View All
A common alternative to this is to create a 'view all' page which lists all pages in a sequence. The search engine would then usually attempt to identify and list this page as the primary landing page for this category but you can further help them along by indicating this is the primary page via a canonical tag pointing to this on each sequence page. I tend to like a sensible name like <category>_view_all.html so deserts_view_all.html if we go with this approach. </category>
Whether you use that depends on your users and whether that or the first page in a sequence is best for them. Certainly, if a category has 500 recipes and 50% of your visitors are on mobile then that would not be the best approach so figure out what is right for the users and rather than Google and then implement the best practice strategies.
Solution
I can see you have the all in one SEO pack which does a lot of good things but I tend to prefer the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and that handles rel=next & rel=prev out the box. All in One SEO may do this but it is not turned on by default.
Not to say there is no other duplication but that should certainly be enough to get you moving in the right direction and in all honesty, don't worry about this too much, just implement the best practice solutions and you will be good to go.
Hope this helps
MarcusReferences
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html
-
_Hi, _
_Check the following URLs - _
_http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/?replytocom=721 - duplicate
http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/
http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/?replytocom=723 duplicateBut canonical has already been set. So no worries. And even in the case of faceted navigation –_
http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/lunches/home-made-corn-chips-2/ http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/kids-parties/home-made-corn-chips-2/
_Canonical is already set. _
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Duplicate title while setting canonical tag.
Hi Moz Fan, My websites - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/ has run financial service, So our main keywords is about "Insurance" in Thai, But today I have an issues regarding to carnonical tag. We have a link that containing by https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance?showForm=1&brand_id=9&model_id=18&car_submodel_id=30&ci_source_id=rabbit.co.th&car_year=2014 and setting canonical to this url - https://finance.rabbit.co.th/car-insurance within 5,000 items. But in this case I have an warning by site audit tools as Duplicate Page Title (Canonical), So is that possible to drop our ranking. What should we do, setting No-Index, No-Follow for all URL that begin with ? or keep them like that.
Technical SEO | | ASKHANUMANTHAILAND0 -
Duplicate content pages on different domains, best practice?
Hi, We are running directory sites on different domains of different countries (we have the country name in the domain name of each site) and we have the same static page on each one, well, we have more of them but I would like to exemplify one static page for the sake of simplicity. So we have http://firstcountry.com/faq.html, http://secondcountry.com/faq.html and so on for 6-7 sites, faq.html from one country and the other have 94% similarity when checked against duplicate content. We would like an alternative approach to canonical cause the content couldn´t belong to only one of this sites, it belongs to all. Second option would be unindex all but one country. It´s syndicated content but we cannot link back to the source cause there is none. Thanks for taking the time in reading this.
Technical SEO | | seosogood0 -
Why is it the crawler saying I have 9 Duplicate Page Titles?
Hi, I received my weekly web crawl and it is saying this: | 4 | Duplicate Page Content |
Technical SEO | | afrohairsolutions
| 22 | Missing Meta Description Tag |
| 9 | Duplicate Page Title |
| 1 | Title Element Too Long (> 70 Characters) |
| 1 | Title Element Too Short |
| 1 | 301 (Permanent Redirect) | I'm new to SEO and don't know how to fix this, I don't really see how I have Duplicate Page Content or Duplicate Page Title. This is my website: afrohairsolutions.co.uk Thank you in advance.0 -
480,000 Redirects - Is this hurting my SEO? PLEASE HELP!
Hello everyone, I have over 480,000 internal rewrites in my Magento site. The reason I have so many is because I have over 1,500 products on my site and I update inventory every day via Bulk Import Extension. For the first few months I didn't realize that the URL was changing by a single digit every time I imported the .xml with new inventory counts. This of course created thousands and thousands of 404s. I figured out how to avoid the digit change and then I started redirecting the 404s via a Bulk Rewrite Extension. I managed to rewrite over over 50,000 404s but new ones still pop up every day and there is no end to them in sight. My traffic is terrible. Only about 40 organics daily. It's been like that for months. I can't get it off the ground and I think it's because of this excessive rewrite and 404 issue. My question is, does having so many internal rewrites and 404s hurt my SEO efforts? Would it be better just to start from scratch with a new site, new domain, new everything? Please help me. I'm going crazy with this. Thank you. Nico.
Technical SEO | | niconico1010 -
Why are my Duplicated Pages not being updated?
I've recently changed a bunch of duplicated pages from our site. I did get a slightly minimized amount of duplicated pages, however, some of the pages that I've already fixed are still unfixed according to MOZ. Whenever I check the back-end of each of these pages, I see that they've already been changed and non of them are the same in terms of Meta Tag Title is concern. Can anyone provide any suggestions on what I should do to get a more accurate result? Is there a process that I'm missing?
Technical SEO | | ckroaster0 -
Please Help! I lost ranking from #1 SERP
PensacolaRealEstate.com I am new to SEO. I lost my first place ranking on google. I held it for YEARS. I think I lost it with the last update... How do I analyze my site to find what is penalizing me? How can I get back to the top?
Technical SEO | | JML11790 -
Duplicate Page Issue
Dear All, I am facing stupid duplicate page issue, My whole site is in dynamic script and all the URLs were in dynamic, So i 've asked my programmer make the URLs user friendly using URL Rewrite, but he converted aspx pages to htm. And the whole mess begun. Now we have 3 different URLs for single page. Such as: http://www.site.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=Multi-Day+City+Tours http://www.tsite.com/CityTour.aspx?nodeid=4&type=4&id=47&order=0&pagesize=4&pagenum=4&val=multi-day-city-tours http://www.site.com/city-tour/multi-day-city-tours/page4-0.htm I think my programmer messed up the URL Rewrite in ASP.net(Nginx) or even didn't use it. So how do i overcome this problem? Should i add canonical tag in both dynamic URLs with pointing to pag4-0.htm. Will it help? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | DigitalJungle0 -
Duplicate Page title - PHP Experts!
After running a crawl diagnostics i was surprised to see 336 duplicate page titles. But i am wondering if it is true or not. Most of them are not a page at all but a .php variation. for example: The following are all the same page, but a different limit on viewing listings. Limiting your view to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 as you choose. .com/?lang=en&limit=5 .com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=10
Technical SEO | | nahopkin
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=15
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=20
.com/?lang=en&limit=5&limitstart=25 Same type of things are going on all over the site causing 228 duplicate content errors and the already mentioned 336 duplicate pages. But is "crawl diagnostic telling the truth" or is it just some php thing? I am not a php expert so any input would be much appreciated. What should i do?0