Pages with duplicate meta descriptions

[Intellect]

We have around 17 pages have underscores in the URL. From the 17 pages, we have changed 3 pages URL for example if the url is test_sample_demo.html, we have changed as test-sample-demo.html

After the updates, we have made redirect as follows

Redirect 301  test_sample_demo.html test-sample-demo.html

Presently google webmaster tool shows as "Pages with duplicate meta descriptions" & "Pages with duplicate title tags" for changed pages

How to fix this. Please help us

[joramtenham]

Hi,

It sounds like the 301 isn't implemented correctly OR Google didn't yet crawl the old URLs after you implemented the redirect.

How long ago did you change the URLs? If it's only a few days ago I'd just wait for Google to crawl your old URLs again and detect the 301.

Hope it helps.

[effectdigital]

This is likely to be Google's auditing system (from within Google Search Console) errors and is (probably) not your fault. If pages which are redirecting are being flagged as having duplicate Meta descriptions, that is demonstrably and necessarily factually inaccurate. A page which redirects somewhere else **never serves its source code **to Google, users or anyone else (assuming that the redirect is global, of course). If the source code is never seen, Google should not be able to find any Meta description let alone a duplicate one.

In all likelihood Google is comparing the new URLs against cached versions of the old pages (instead of re-visiting the old addresses as live URLs like it should do). As such it believes there's duplicate Meta data. When it eventually bothers to _actually _re-crawl the old URLs - it will eventually work out its issues and fix itself. If you want to speed it along, Fetch and render the old URLs so that Google knows they are actually redirecting now. Following that, spam the 'mark as fixed' thing until it complies with your work.

If however you are exempting Google from those particular redirects (maybe via the Googlebot user-agent), then obviously it can't see the redirects and is still accessing the old page-versions. Make sure that Google follows 301 redirects in the same way that users are forced to.

Be sure to test the redirects manually using something like this chrome extension. Test that the redirects work. Set your user-agent to Googlebot, do a hard refresh to clear your cache - try the page again. Try using a VPN to access the redirects from servers in different locations (try the UK, somewhere in Europe, the USA). Sometimes redirects are 'conditional' and if Google is somehow slipping through the net, that's a problem for you. Never just accept "well someone told me it was coded like this so it must always apply". Test manually, work out the real truth

Hope that helps!