Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
-
Hi
I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors.
The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages.
I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this.
The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening.
Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error?
Alex
-
Hi Keri
No, never resolved. Thanks for the suggestion!
Regards
Alex
-
Hi Alex,
Were you able to get this resolved? If you still have this problem, you might want to drop an email to help at seomoz dot org and have the help team look at it to see if they can figure it out. Thanks!
Keri
-
That's the other odd thing - I'm not getting any errors for duplicate page content, just for duplicate page titles.
-
Hmm, I can't say I'm sure why that is, Alex. It might have something to do with the SEOmoz crawl that I'm not aware of. It sounds like my blog site is set up much the same way as yours, but I do not have duplicate content errors showing up for this reason in either SEOmoz or GMT.
-
Hi Jeffrey
I have Yoast SEO set up to do the same, from when I first installed it last year. The /page/X code is also showing that the pages are noindex, follow.
The odd things here are 1) Google Webmaster Tools is not picking this up as an error, only SEOMoz crawl, 2) the error only shows since 1 Feb.
-
It seems what's happening here is that the error is related to posts that are no longer on the front page of your site. When you click to go to see "Previous posts" or something like that, that's when you're going to mysite.com/page/2, mysite.com/page/3, etc.
I have the Yoast SEO plugin set to "noindex, follow" these pages, and I do not get the problem showing up in my campaigns. I believe this is one of the options on the "Indexing" tab. I think it may be the "Subpages of archives and taxonomies" option that should be checked.
The easiest way to figure out is to check this option and then immediate check the page source code of "mysite.com/page/2" to see if it's being indexed or not. If the "nonindex, follow" tag exists, you should be set and this warning will probably disappear on your next crawl.
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
-
Near Duplicate Title Tag Checker
Hi Everyone, I know there are a lot of tools like Siteliner, which can check the uniqueness of body copy, but are there any that can restrict the check to the title tags alone? Alternatively, is there an Excel or Google Sheets function that would allow me to do the same thing? Thanks, Andy
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AndyRSB0 -
How does Yoast SEO premium determine prominent keywords?
We are perplexed how Yoast determines which keywords to select on the page when ranking the top 5 prominent words in Insights. For example, we have a page where birthday parties is clearly the primary keyword. It is used an an H2, in body copy and tagged on images. Yet it does not show up at all. The term 20 Fiesta game points ranks #1. It is mentioned one time on the page in a bullet within one of 5-6 blocks. 40 Fiesta game points ranks 3rd and same situation. Waterpark ranks 4th and is mentioned twice on the page as a bullet of featured activities. But there ar 4-5 other attractions listed in the bullets higher? We have looked as tutorial videos and no one mentions how Yoast determines prominent keywords. Thanks in advance for steering us in the right direction.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Teamzig0 -
Duplicate H1 on single page for mobile and desktop
I have a responsive site and whilst this works and is liked by google from a user perspective the pages could look better on mobile. I have a wordpress site and use the Divi Builder with elegant themes and have developed a separate page header for mobile that uses a manipulated background image and smaller H1 font size. When crawling the site two H1s can be detected on the same page - they are exactly the same words and only one will show according to device. However, I need to know if this will cause me a problem with google and SEO. As the mobile changes are not just font size but also adaptations to some visual elements it is not something I can simply alter in the CSS. Would appreciate some input as to whether this is a problem or not
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Cells4Life0 -
Help article / Knowledge base SEO consideration
Hi everyone, I am in the process of building the knowledge base for our SaaS product and I am afraid it could impact us negatively on the SEO side because of: Thin content on pages containing short answers to specific questions Keyword cannibalisation between some of our blog articles and the knowledge base articles I didn't find much on the impact of knowledge bases on SEO when I searched on Google. So I'm hoping we can use this thread to share a few thoughts and best practices on this topic. Below is a bit more details on the issues I face, any tips on how to address them would be most welcome. 1. Thin content: Some articles will have thin content by design: the H1 will be a specific question and there will be only 2 or 3 lines of text answering it in the article. I think creating a dedicated article per question is better than grouping 20 questions on one article from a UX point of view, because this will enable us to direct users more quickly to the answer when they use the live search function inside the software (help widget) or on the knowledge base (saves them the need to scrolling a long article to find the answer). Now the issue is that this will result in lots of pages with thin content. A workaround could be to have both a detailed FAQ style page with all the questions and answers, and individual articles for each question on top of that. The FAQ style page could be indexed in Google while the individual articles would have either a noIndex directive or a rel canonical to the FAQ style page. Have any of you faced similar issues when setting-up your knowledge base? Which approach would you recommend? 2.Keyword cannibalisation: There will be, to some extend, a level of keyword cannibalisation between our blog articles (which rank well) and some of the knowledge base articles. While we want both types of articles to appear in search, we don't want the "How to do XYZ" blog article containing practical tips to compete with the "How to do XYZ in the software" knowledge base article. Do you have any advice on how to achieve that? Having a specific Schema.org (or equivalent) type of markup to differentiate between the 2 types of articles would have been ideal but I couldn't find anything relating to help articles specifically when I searched.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | tbps0 -
Page Title shown in SERPS not the same as
Hi all, I'm trying to get a homepage to rank for a certain term, but the page keeps showing up in the SERPS with the "Brand Name: Keyword" when I have written it as "Keyword - Brand Name" in the <title>tag. I can't even see "Brand Name" Keyword" in the code of the page so I don't know where Google is pulling this from? </p> <p>I have <meta name="robots" content="noodp,noydir"/> on the page.</p> <p>I'm running Yoast and have removed the Brand from the Site Name and the Page Title for the homepage is "Keyword - Brand Name" in WordPress. I've changed the meta description so I can see the page has been crawled and re-indexed as the new meta description is showing in the SERPs</p> <p>Any idea, where Google is pulling this Page Title from and how I can get it changed to read the actual <title> tag? Or is there something I need to change in WordPress?</p> <p>Thank you!</p></title>
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Marketing_Today0 -
Contextual FAQ and FAQ Page, is this duplicate content?
Hi Mozzers, On my website, I have a FAQ Page (with the questions-responses of all the themes (prices, products,...)of my website) and I would like to add some thematical faq on the pages of my website. For example : adding the faq about pricing on my pricing page,... Is this duplicate content? Thank you for your help, regards. Jonathan
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JonathanLeplang0 -
Membership/subscriber (/customer) only content and SEO best practice
Hello Mozzers, I was wondering whether there's any best practice guidance out there re: how to deal with membership/subscriber (existing customer) only content on a website, from an SEO perspective - what is best practice? A few SEOs have told me to make some of the content visible to Google, for SEO purposes, yet I'm really not sure whether this is acceptable / manipulative, and I don't want to upset Google (or users for that matter!) Thanks in advance, Luke
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Javascript to fetch page title for every webpage, is it good?
We have a zend framework that is complex to program if you ask me, and since we have 20k+ pages that we need to get proper titles to and meta descriptions, i need to ask if we use Javascript to handle page titles (basically the previously programming team had NOT set page titles at all) and i need to get proper page titles from a h1 tag within the page. current course of action which we can easily implement is fetch page title from that h1 tag being used throughout all pages with the help of javascript, But this does makes it difficult for engines to actually read what's the page title? since its being fetched with javascript code that we have put in, though i had doubts, is anyone one of you have simiilar situation before? if yes i need some help! Update: I tried the JavaScript way and here is what it looks like http://islamicencyclopedia.org/public/index/hadith/id/1/book_id/106 i know the fact that google won't read JavaScript like the way we have done with the website, But i need help on "How we can work around this issue" Knowing we don't have other options.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SmartStartMediacom0