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
-
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 -
Pages with Title Missing or Empty
When I crawl my site MOZ gave me 275 Pages with Title Missing or Empty within the High Priority Issues. So I went I reviewed it and the pages are Tag's that I use in my Blog posts. For example: https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+cuenca+cigars https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+florida https://www.cuencacigars.com/blog/tag/+Mobile How do I fix this? Is that a real error or is just MOZ been MOZZY? The pages have Authority 11, may I put some content on those pages since they had a decent rank? Maybe I can use this to my advantage? Or maybe I should choose my tags better? Is there anything to learn to tag?
Technical SEO | | mcuenca24100 -
Duplicate Page Titles Across Portfolio Items
Hi, Quick question about duplicate page titles. I have a few duplicate pages where I've got lots of portfolio items under the same category, lets call it a portfolio of kangaroos. I can see there are separate URLs for each of the pages, i.e, www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos and www.blahblah.com/portfolio/kangaroos/2, but they both have the same page title, i.e, Kangaroos Portfolio | Domain and it's coming up in Moz as a medium priority duplicate page title error. Where in WordPress can I change the page title for the second page of portfolio items? Thanks very much! Tom.
Technical SEO | | onefoursix0 -
Added 301 redirects, pages still earning duplicate content warning
We recently added a number of 301 redirects for duplicate content pages, but even with this addition they are still showing up as duplicate content. Am I missing something here? Or is this a duplicate content warning I should ignore?
Technical SEO | | cglife0 -
Duplicate Title - Shopping Website
My website is showing with errors due to duplicate titles, these errors add up to over 150 errors. The problem is a lot of my products are similar, just in different lengths, colors etc. For example
Technical SEO | | adelemaree
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots/48-classic-candy-short-australia-ugg-boots-blue.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/31-classic-candy-button-short-chocolate.html
http://www.ugg.org.au/en/classic-candy-button-short-australia-ugg-boots/28-classic-candy-button-short-black.html How can I avoid this error without having to merge all my products and colors into one page? As that would make my catalogue look too small! Thanks in advance0 -
Issue: Duplicate Page Content
Hi All, I am getting warnings about duplicate page content. The pages are normally 'tag' pages. I have some blog posts tagged with multiple 'tags'. Does it really affect my site?. I am using wordpress and Yoast SEO plugin. Thanks
Technical SEO | | KLLC0 -
50+ duplicate content pages - Do we remove them all or 301?
We are working on a site that has 50+ pages that all have duplicate content (1 for each state, pretty much). Should we 301 all 50 of the URLs to one URL or should we just completely get rid of all the pages? Are there any steps to take when completely removing pages completely? (submit sitemap to google webmaster tools, etc) thanks!
Technical SEO | | Motava0 -
Duplicate titles OK if page don't need to rank well?
I know It is not a good idea to have duplicate titles across a website on pages as Google does not like this. Is it ok to have duplicate titles on pages that aren't being optimised with SERP's in mind? or could this have a negative effect on the pages that are being optimised?
Technical SEO | | iSenseWebSolutions0