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.
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.
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.
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?
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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?
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.
Thanks Brad. I won’t worry about it. It doesn’t seem to hurt my page rank.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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
Let me know if you need help Jeannine
How do you get the archives to not show duplicate content? I cannot find a soultion for the archives anywhere
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?
How about when google claims that your comments page for a specific also has a duplicate title as the post? What then?
Change the title so its not duplicate. Google Webmaster Tools isn’t entirely accurate and can take weeks to update