My client is using a mobile template for their local pages and the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions
-
So my client has 2000+ different store locations. Each location has the standard desktop location and my client opted for a corresponding mobile template for each location. Now the Google search console is reporting thousands of duplicate titles/meta descriptions. However this is only because the mobile template and desktop store pages are using the exact same title/meta description tag.
Is Google penalizing my client for this? Would it be worth it to update the mobile template title/meta description tags?
-
Excellent advice. Thanks Andy!
-
Hi Rosemary,
Is Google penalizing my client for this?
Does it look like there is any penalty going on?
What you need to do is add a rel=alternate from the desktop location pages to the mobile versions and a rel=canonical from the mobile page back to the desktop version. This should remedy all duplication issues and send Google the correct signals at the same time.
What Google says...
- On the desktop page, add a special link rel=”alternate” tag pointing to the corresponding mobile URL. This helps Googlebot discover the location of your site’s mobile pages.
- On the mobile page, add a link rel=”canonical” tag pointing to the corresponding desktop URL.
You can read the information you need that matches your separate page format here on Google.
This should fix all issues.
-Andy
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
-
Pages being flagged in Search Console as having a "no-index" tag, do not have a meta robots tag??
Hi, I am running a technical audit on a site which is causing me a few issues. The site is small and awkwardly built using lots of JS, animations and dynamic URL extensions (bit of a nightmare). I can see that it has only 5 pages being indexed in Google despite having over 25 pages submitted to Google via the sitemap in Search Console. The beta Search Console is telling me that there are 23 Urls marked with a 'noindex' tag, however when i go to view the page source and check the code of these pages, there are no meta robots tags at all - I have also checked the robots.txt file. Also, both Screaming Frog and Deep Crawl tools are failing to pick up these urls so i am a bit of a loss about how to find out whats going on. Inevitably i believe the creative agency who built the site had no idea about general website best practice, and that the dynamic url extensions may have something to do with the no-indexing. Any advice on this would be really appreciated. Are there any other ways of no-indexing pages which the dev / creative team might have implemented by accident? - What am i missing here? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | NickG-1230 -
Will redirecting a logged in user from a public page to an equivalent private page (not visible to google) impact SEO?
Hi, We have public pages that can obviously be visited by our registered members. When they visit these public pages + they are logged in to our site, we want to redirect them to the equivalent (richer) page on the private site e.g. a logged in user visiting /public/contentA will be redirected to /private/contentA Note: Our /public pages are indexed by Google whereas /private pages are excluded. a) will this affect our SEO? b) if not, is 302 the best http status code to use? Cheers
Technical SEO | | bernienabo0 -
How to de-index a page with a search string with the structure domain.com/?"spam"
The site in question was hacked years ago. All the security scans come up clean but the seo crawlers like semrush and ahrefs still show it as an indexed page. I can even click through on it and it takes me to the homepage with no 301. Where is the page and how to deindex it? domain/com/?spam There are multiple instances of this. http://www.clipular.com/c/5579083284217856.png?k=Q173VG9pkRrxBl0b5prNqIozPZI
Technical SEO | | Miamirealestatetrendsguy1 -
Wrong page title in Google
Hi there, A while ago we took over the domain www.hoesjes.nl and forwarded it to our website www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. If you perform a search for the keyword 'hoesjes' in Google then we (www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl) show up on an organic number 1 position. The problem is that the page title isn't correct. Google shows the page title of the website hoesjes.nl we took over and (correctly?) redirected to our domain www.telefoonhoesjesxl.nl. Does anybody have any idea how to get rid of this wrong page title in Google?
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Here you can find a screenshot of what I mean. Thanks! Marcel0 -
/index.php/ page
I was wondering if my system creates this page www my domain com/index.php/ is it better to block with robot.txt or just canonize?
Technical SEO | | ciznerguy0 -
Duplicate Page Title with Pretashop
We have our main website and blog in Wordpress under www.enasport.com and our shop with Prestashop under www.enasport.com/productos so all our products have for example www.enasport.com/productos/56-creatina-monohidrato.html I wonder if this is the problem with Duplicate Page Title as seems we have more than 200 of this issue. Is there any way to solve this?
Technical SEO | | ENASports0 -
Many items with similar descriptions showing up as duplicate page titles
Hi, We are just a small company trying to understand this seo business. :O) I hope you will give us your input on how we look and how we can improve. www.bakerbay.com Each week I go down the seomoz crawl and change the duplicate page titles it increases the duplicate page content. Then the next week it seems to find other titles that have been fixed that are afluwie now. Please help. We are a bead company and alot of our products have a similar description but have different colors and items numbers. Could you please advise me on how to fix these errors and increase our ranking? All the Best, Beth
Technical SEO | | BakerBayBeadCo0