Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags
-
Webmaster is giving errors of Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags after I changes the permalinks structure in wordpress.
It there a quick fix for this and how damaging is the above for seo.
Thanks T
-
Hi i hope its ok, i sent the links/urls to your email
Regards T
-
If you changed 2500 URLs on a 10 year old site and didn't create redirects then you have a much bigger problem on your hands than Moz alerts.
- Did you create 301 redirects after changing these URLs?
- Please send an example of a new URL and the old version of that URL.
- Is your traffic holding steady in Google Analytics since you made these changes?
-
Thanks Kane, Webmaster says that I have 2500 Duplicate title tags and 2300 Duplicate meta descriptions
Is there a quick way to fix these
I am using redirection plugin which redirects the both urls to the same page. Google last crawled the page on the 25th Feb..
The site is 10 years old
Thanks
-
You'll need to create redirects from the old URLs to the new URLs. Once Moz gets a chance to recrawl this within a month the errors should go away.
If you changed the permalink structure on an established site (not a new site), then it's even more important to create these redirects, both for users and for web crawlers trying to give you credit for your incoming links.
-
Hi Eric,
I changed the permalinks months ago...
what should I be looking for in Screaming Frog..
Just ran Screaming Frog and it does not show any major duplicate issues..
-
If you have changed the permalinks structure, then I would use a crawler to crawl your own site and look at the meta data. The "duplicate title tags", etc. errors take some time to show up in Google Search Console, at least a day or two. So you may want to re-check it in a few days if you just made corrections on your site.
You can use a campaign here in Moz to check the data, or you can use a crawler like the Screaming Frog SEO spider to check all the data yourself (which is much quicker).
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
-
Google Adding Wrong Location to Title Tag on Multi-Branch Business Homepage
We're a business with 5 separate locations across 5 cities in Upstate NY. While doing some visual ad previews in the adwords interface I noticed that Google is altering my title tag and adding the word "Rochester" to the end of it, cutting short my designated title tag. Rochester is the location of our headquarters so not a big deal for 1/5th of our customers. But to my dismay, the same thing is happening when searching from the geo locations of my other branches. So when searching for my business in Buffalo (we have a physical address in Buffalo), the title tag in the results still says our company name and "Rochester". This of course is likely leading to confusion and actively harming our organic CTR in our branch locations. This is happening in all of the remaining 4 branch locations. I'm at a loss, I tried lengthening the title tag but it still gets cut off. The term Rochester appears (as do the other branch locations) in my meta description for the homepage as well as in the text of the page itself. I haven't gone so far as to remove that yet and hopefully don't have to. Does anyone have any ideas? Thank you in advance!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Doylejg30 -
Title tag: Long tail words or keyword dilution?
Hi all, I am a newbie to SEO. Lately, I have been struggling to optimize my title tag. Ones say that we should have long tail words in title tags because long tail words improve click through rate and generate quality leads. On the other hand, ones say that putting other words in the title tag will dilute the main keyword that my page ranks for. Do keywords really dilute each other in the title tags? I am really confused. Let me give this an example: Web Design Services | Company Name Web Design Services with Conversion Focused | Company Name Which one would you prefer and why? Thank you. 😄 Best, Raymond
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Raymondlee0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Title Tags for pagination
Here's a specific question about title tags for ecommerce website... We've got lists of products (category list pages) that stretch for many pages... is there any benefit to added a something to make the title tag unique. For example: Page 1: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> Page 2: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example - Page 2</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> Page 3: <title></span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1">Category List Page Example - Page 3</span><span class="html-tag" data-mce-mark="1"></title> FWIW, we've got the pagination and canonicalization nailed down tight. Moz crawl actual brought a dupe content issue based on title tags.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | 19prince0 -
Pagination and matching title tags - does it matter when using rel="prev" and "next" attributes?
I'm looking at a site with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place, to deal with pagination. However, the pages in each paginated category have identical page titles - is this an issue? Rand gives an example of how he'd vary page titles here, to prevent problems, though I'm not entirely sure whether this advice applies to sites with the rel="prev" and "next" HTML attributes in place: https://moz.com/blog/pagination-best-practices-for-seo-user-experience Any advice would be welcome - many thanks, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Have Title Tags Changed After Hummingbird?
Now that Hummingbird is really looking at longer-tail searches and almost a Q&A style search, should the way we do our title tags change? Moz still recommends: Optimal Format Primary Keyword - Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | netviper
or
Brand Name | Primary Keyword and Secondary Keyword But is this really right anymore after Hummingbird? Should we be more of a Q&A type title tag, while still using our Primary Keyword? For example: If I am targeting Red Nike Shoes, should my title tag be: Red Nike Shoes, Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or now: We carry the latest Red Nike Shoes | Shoes.com or Find Red Nike Shoes on sale at shoes.com What are your thoughts?0 -
Advice needed on how to handle alleged duplicate content and titles
Hi I wonder if anyone can advise on something that's got me scratching my head. The following are examples of urls which are deemed to have duplicate content and title tags. This causes around 8000 errors, which (for the most part) are valid urls because they provide different views on market data. e.g. #1 is the summary, while #2 is 'Holdings and Sector weightings'. #3 is odd because it's crawling the anchored link. I didn't think hashes were crawled? I'd like some advice on how best to handle these, because, really they're just queries against a master url and I'd like to remove the noise around duplicate errors so that I can focus on some other true duplicate url issues we have. Here's some example urls on the same page which are deemed as duplicates. 1) http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Holdings-and-sectors-weighting?s=IVPM:LSE http://markets.ft.com/Research/Markets/Tearsheets/Summary?s=IVPM:LSE&widgets=1 What's the best way to handle this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SearchPM0 -
Some viagra spammer somehow fooled Google into thinking the title and description metatags of a site pointing to me are about viagra. How did they do that? How do I fix this?
In performing a link: to my site, I found this: Video Of People Using Viagra - Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping <cite>www.planetherbs.com/affiliate-program.html</cite> - Cached -Block all www.planetherbs.com results1 day ago – Video Of People Using Viagra. Online Drug Store, Guaranteed Shipping. Check Order Status. Natural and healthy products! If you go to that url, you will see it's just an affiliate program page. Some viagra spammer somehow changed the title and description metatags that google sees (not actually) and links from what appears to be spammy pages are pointing to me. I don't want to get dinged for this. How do I fix these for myself and planetherbs.com? And how did the spammer do this???
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KatMouse0 -
Should I completly remove the meta tags keywords in the html page?
So if the metag is not longer used by the search engines should I keep them in my html ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lomastravel0