Duplicate Meta Descriptions From Pages That Don't Exist

[southcoasthost]

Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here.

I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around.

Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go.

Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption

url 1: /

url 2: /about/who-we-are

I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear

The second one I am getting is the following:

/services/57/

/services/

Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page

the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools.

If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this.

Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this.

Thanks in advance

[southcoasthost]

Hi Dan,

Thanks for the detailed reply. I will follow these suggestions up and fingers crossed it should sort the problem.

edit:

I have spotted the permalinks is set to following

/blog/%category%/%postname%/

am i right that the /blog/ could be removed just leaving /%category%/%postname%/ for the same effect.

Thanks

[evolvingSEO]

This one's a little mysterious for sure!

Your theme seems to be allowing a number added after the URL - like any of these actually load the page (without a 404)

• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/services/1/
• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/jobs/100000/
• http://www.ministryofsearch.net/about/873918/

BUT - words don't work;

http://www.ministryofsearch.net/about/dog/ <---gets a 404 page, that's what should happen with the numbers.

Somehow your theme is allowing these numbers to be added. Some thoughts;

• Check your permalink settings. Could be a simple surface level fix like that
• If you're comfortable with .htaccess see if there's any setting in there that would allow these pages to load (you can view .htaccess right within Yoast->Files)
• Comb through your plugins and see if any are allowing this setting
• Worst case, you may need to take this back to whomever developed your theme.

The end result, is you don't want pages to be able to load with those numbers at the end like that. Anything besides the exact URL (or tracking parameters) should return a 404.

Hope that helps you get in the right direction!

-Dan