How can we fix duplicate title tags like these being reported in GWT?
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Hi all,
I posted this in the GWT Forum on Monday and still no answers so I will try here. Our URL is http://www.ccisolutions.com
We have over 200 pages on our site being flagged by GWT as having
duplicate title tags. The majority of them look similar to this:Title: <a>JBL EON MusicMix 16 | Mixer | CCI Solutions</a>
GWT is reporting these URLs to have all the same title:
/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Category/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Footer/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?Origin=Header/StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=../StoreFront/product/R-JBL-MUSICMIX.prod?origin=GoogleBaseThese are all the same page. There was a time when we used these origin codes, but we stopped using them over a year ago. We also added canonical tags to every page to prevent us from having duplicate content issues. However, these origin codes are
still showing up in GWT. Is there anything we can do to fix this problem. Do we have a technical issue with our site code and the way Google is seeing our dynamic URLs? Any suggestions on how we can fix this problem? The same is true in our report for Meta descriptions. Thanks
you,
Dana Tan -
Hi Greg,
I have a follow up question. Because these pages are being dynamically generated from the base URL, the only place to put the meta no index tag would be on the parent URL, which of course we don't want to do because it needs to be indexed. Can we add these individual URLs [just the ones with origin codes] to the robots.txt file?
Dana
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Thanks very much to you both. This is super helpful!
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If your going to 301 the URLs, be sure to 404 them first otherwise you wont be able to send a removal request in G-WMT
To remove a page or image, you must do one of the following:
- Make sure the content is no longer live on the web. Requests for the page must return an HTTP 404 (not found) or 410 status code.
- Block the content using a robots.txt file.
- Block the content using a meta noindex tag.
GREG
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I like the idea of 301's the best in this case - in any event all of your suggestions are right on. Thumb up!
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Hi,
These pages exist and are exact duplicates according to Google. You said you stopped generating these URL's over year ago?
Why not just 404 all children URL's?
Once done, you can either request them to be removed from the index, wait for them to disappear or you could 301 them if the children URL's are still getting traffic.
Just make sure that you have no links internally pointing to any of the children URLs and Google should forget about them,
Once your done with all the above, you can mark the errors as fixed, and Google should stop reporting them,
GREG
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