How can we fix duplicate title tags like these being reported in GWT?
-
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
-
Thanks very much to you both. This is super helpful!
-
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
-
I like the idea of 301's the best in this case - in any event all of your suggestions are right on. Thumb up!
-
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
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 Results Title vs My Page Title
I'm having some trouble with my titles of a new site, it has been online for around two months now and i'm getting weird titles from most indexed pages. Since my site is focused on finding courses, the course title format is the following: URL: https://www.maseducacion.com/estudios/programacion-curricular--tecnigrap-2982
Technical SEO | | JoaoCJ
My Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand
Google Search Title: Course - Institute | Mybrand - Educativa Half of my results have that word at the end, don't know where it comes from, that word is only included in two links. Any idea on how to fix it?0 -
Google is shortening many of my title tags although they are already quite concise
Hi, Title tags of our website are being truncated by Google even though they can be very short (sometimes < 40 characters) and with very few capital letters. We would like to understand why. Example: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcde - OurBrand shows up as: Principal component analysis (pca) in abcd... - OurBrand where abcde is the name of a very common software (5 characters), and OurBrand is a 6 characters long string (could be used in either lower case or upper case). Even when removing the brackets around pca, truncation still occurs... Any clue why?
Technical SEO | | trigaudias1 -
Getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as duplicate pages and duplicate page titles can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what might I be missing?
I am getting high priority issue for our xxx.com and xxx.com/home as reporting both duplicate pages and duplicate page titles on crawl results, I can't seem to find anything that needs to be corrected, what am I be missing? Has anyone else had a similar issue, how was it corrected?
Technical SEO | | tgwebmaster0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
Duplicate Pages on GWT when redesigning website
Hi, we recently redesigned our online shop. We have done the 301 redirects for all product pages to the new URL (and went live about 1.5 week ago), but GWT indicated that the old product URL and the new product URL are 2 different pages with the same meta title tags (duplication) - when in fact, the old URL is 301 redirecting to the new URL when visited. I found this article on google forum: https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/webmasters/CvCjeNOxOUw
Technical SEO | | Essentia
It says we either just wait for Google to re-crawl, of use the fetch URL function for the OLD URLs. Question is, after i fetch the OLD URL to tell Google that it's being redirected, should i click the button 'submit to index' or not? (See screengrab - please note that it was the OLD URL that was being fetched, not the NEW URL). I mean, if i click this button, is it telling Google that: a. 'This old URL has been redirected, therefore please index the new URL'? or
b. 'Please keep this old URL in your index'? What's your view on this? Thanks1 -
How to fix it?
I have a website on Wix with the domain spinteedubai.com. But I want to transfer the same website into the wordpress. In order for me to transfer the current domain www.spinteedubai.com from Wix to Hostgator, there is a 60 day waiting period. Which means, i will not be able to transfer until April 1, 2014. So, in terms of next steps and impact on SEO , what do you suggest we do ? 1. Wait till April and transfer the current domain name ?
Technical SEO | | Dan_Brown1
2. Register another domain and put the site up immediately while keeping the wix site (so we would have for example: www.spintee.ae &www.spinteedubai.com. But my understanding is that google does not like to see 2 site exactly the same.0 -
Duplicate Page Title for a Large Listing Website
My company has a popular website that has over 4,000 crawl errors showing in Moz, most of them coming up as Duplicate Page Title. These duplicate page titles are coming from pages with the title being the keyword, then location, such as: "main keyword" North Carolina
Technical SEO | | StorageUnitAuctionList
"main keyword" Texas ... and so forth. These pages are ranked and get a lot of traffic. I was wondering what the best solution is for resolving these types of crawl errors without it effecting our rankings. Thanks!0 -
Crawl Errors for duplicate titles/content when canonicalised or noindexed
Hi there, I run an ecommerce store and we've recently started changing the way we handle pagination links and canonical links. We run Magento, so each category eg /shoes has a number of parameters and pages depending on the number of products in the category. For example /shoes?mode=grid will display products in grid view, /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 is page 2 in grid mode. Previously, all URL variations per category were canonicalised to /shoes. Now, we've been advised to paginate the base URLs with page number only. So /shoes has a pagination next link to /shoes?p=2, page 2 has a prev link to /shoes and a next link to /shoes?p=3. When any other parameter is introduced (such as mode=grid) we canonicalise that back to the main category URL of /shoes and put a noindex meta tag on the page. However, SEOMoz is picking up duplicate title warnings for urls like /shoes?p=2 and /shoes?mode=grid&p=2 despite the latter being canonicalised and having a noindex tag. Presumably search engines will look at the canonical and the noindex tag so this shouldn't be an issue. Is that correct, or should I be concerned by these errors? Thanks.
Technical SEO | | Fergus_Macdonald0