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How To Fix Duplicate Title Tags Detected in Google Webmaster Tools

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by

Brad Dalton

Google webmaster tools provides a range of free tools which help improve your sites visibility on Google. Webmaster tools allow you to see how Google indexes your site and diagnose problems so you can improve your sites visibility.

In order to diagnose and fix duplicate title tags, you’ll need to sign up for a Google Webmaster Tools and navigate to Diagnostics > HTML Suggestions.

Here you can find out if the Google bot detected any problems with your title tags.

Recently i have added post tags to my site and made some changes to my categories. Some of these changes have caused a minor problem by duplicating existing title tags so i want to share with you the method i use to fix them.

Here’s what Google has to say:

When Googlebot crawled your site, it found some issues with your content. These issues won’t prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but addressing them may help your site’s user experience and performance. Source: Google

Duplicate title tags

Your title provides users and search engines with useful information about your site. Text contained in title tags can appear in search results pages, and relevant, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on. We recommend reviewing the list and updating the title tags wherever possible. Source: Google

Duplicate title tags aren’t good for Seo so here’s how i went about fixing them.

Pages with Duplicate Title Tags

I’ve already provided the solution on how to fix duplicate category slugs but how about fixing post tags which duplicate existing category slugs?

Simply renaming or deleting the duplicate post tags is the easiest way.

Navigate to Posts > Post Tags  and type the name of the tag into the Search tags box to locate the tag you wish to edit or delete.

Edit Post Tags

Here i edited the tag name and tag slug to a unique taxonomy then updated the slug which is a simple fix anybody can use.

Update Tag

All these duplicate title tags have been easily fixed and know should no longer show up in Google Webmaster Tools after a few days or so. Google provides historic data so i’ll have to wait to confirm the minor issues have been properly resolved.

Did you find this posy helpful?

Are there any other error or fixes you need help with?

Comments

13 responses to “How To Fix Duplicate Title Tags Detected in Google Webmaster Tools”

  1. Ryan Avatar
    Ryan

    Thanks for getting back to me so quickly. I have one more question. When I type the old url in my browser it doesn’t 404, it just goes to the new url. Is this normal?

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      That’s what you want. Not sure if you used a redirect for this. WordPress will automatically redirect posts when the permalink is changed but sounds like you just changed the titles.

      Even if you change the permalink on a post, the post i.d doesn’t change so your links aren’t broken.

      1. Ryan Avatar
        Ryan

        Thanks Brad. I won’t worry about it. It doesn’t seem to hurt my page rank.

  2. Ryan Avatar
    Ryan

    I changed the titles of my product pages. When recently checking webmaster tools I discovered duplicate titles and content. An example: marvelousroots.com/garlic-seed-for-sale/german-red-garlic-seed/ and I changed it to marvelousroots.com/garlic-seed-for-sale/german-red/. When I click on the original url in webmaster tools it takes me to the new one. I’m not sure how to fix this. Any advice would be greatly appreciated as I am fairly new to websites.

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      The old url’s should 404 unless you redirect them so i wouldn’t worry about GWMT as they can take a long time to update with accurate info.

  3. Toni Laird Avatar
    Toni Laird

    Hi Brad

    Thanks for the post. Not sure if you can help me here but I recently changed my permalinks from ‘category-post’ to ‘post’ but Google Webmaster is showing duplicate title tags as below:

    /events-asia/team-building-in-laos/
    /team-building-in-laos/

    The first included the category! Is this due to the permalink change and do I simply leave it?

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      Hello Toni

      GWMT can be very slow to update so it might takes months for them to crawl all your permalinks.

      You could also add a redirect in your .htaccess file which is something your host maybe able to help you with.

  4. Jeannine Avatar
    Jeannine

    Yes, actually it does. Maybe you want to reply to my comment so I can respond and thank you for the fix. Thanks again, I will try Yoast, but it’s mainly the archives that keep indexing as duplicate content, and there is no way to change the title of each archive page since it renders automatically. So I assumed adding no follow would do the trick. Maybe it just takes time. I will see, and install yoast. Thanks

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      Let me know if you need help Jeannine

  5. Jeannine Avatar
    Jeannine

    How do you get the archives to not show duplicate content? I cannot find a soultion for the archives anywhere

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      May it has something to do with these facts:

      • GWT can take months to update
      • Just because you add no follow doesn’t mean they don’t follow them. In my opinion they do

      I’d change the duplicate titles so they’re no longer duplicates

      You’re referring to page/post titles and not post tags right?

      SEO by Yoast is a better plugin but you don’t even need this is you use a theme like Thesis

      Does that help?

  6. Jd_1530 Avatar
    Jd_1530

    How about when google claims that your comments page for a specific also has a duplicate title as the post?  What then?

    1. Brad Dalton Avatar
      Brad Dalton

      Change the title so its not duplicate. Google Webmaster Tools isn’t entirely accurate and can take weeks to update

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