We have over 3000 duplicate page titles, please help!

[stayathomemum]

Hi, we did a crawl report and have over 3000 duplicate page titles. I'm not sure why this is happening... could it be because we have put posts in multiple categories? Can anyone help us with a quick fix? our site is www.stayathomemum.com.au

thank you kindly,

Chris

[Debdulal]

_Hi, _

_Check the following URLs - _

_http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/?replytocom=721 - duplicate
http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/
http://stayathomemum.com.au/houseandhome/diy-cleaning-products/home-made-wool-wash/?replytocom=723 duplicate

But canonical has already been set. So no worries. And even in the case of faceted navigation –_

http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/lunches/home-made-corn-chips-2/ http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/kids-parties/home-made-corn-chips-2/

_Canonical is already set. _

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey Chris

I can see this is a WordPress site so it may be that you have nothing to worry about. A few examples would be helpful so we can see if this is effecting various types of pages (posts / pages / categories / tags) but I can likely give you some pointers with a quick dig into the source.

So, assuming it is the SEOMoz tool that is telling you that you have duplicate page titles lets have a look at the site and some examples.

So, WordPress is organised by various taxonomies including category, tag, author and date. Any of these pages can have a primary page and then additional pages when there are too many posts in a given section.

Lets have a look at an example: Recipes > Deserts

http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/desserts/

Desserts | Stay at Home Mum - Survive and Thrive on One Wage

This section has several sub categories for older posts all with a very similar page title:

http://stayathomemum.com.au/recipes/desserts/page/2/

Desserts | Stay at Home Mum - Survive and Thrive on One Wage - Part 2

Now, this is not exactly the same as we have ' - Part 2' at the end (page 2 would be better maybe?) but where you have a large site like this, with hundreds of categories, it does not take long for all of those categories to get several sub pages and to generate a whole bunch of similar or duplicate page titles.

Now, Google generally understands this but there are some simple ways to deal with this that can help them better understand your site. One of these is the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags. These tags exist to help indicate that a page is part of a paginated series as your category pages are.

The net result of this approach is that any indexing power is concentrate on the first page in the group so any links picked up by page 2, 3 etc are all allocated to the first page in the sequence.

Alternative - View All

A common alternative to this is to create a 'view all' page which lists all pages in a sequence. The search engine would then usually attempt to identify and list this page as the primary landing page for this category but you can further help them along by indicating this is the primary page via a canonical tag pointing to this on each sequence page. I tend to like a sensible name like <category>_view_all.html so deserts_view_all.html if we go with this approach. </category>

Whether you use that depends on your users and whether that or the first page in a sequence is best for them. Certainly, if a category has 500 recipes and 50% of your visitors are on mobile then that would not be the best approach so figure out what is right for the users and rather than Google and then implement the best practice strategies.

Solution

I can see you have the all in one SEO pack which does a lot of good things but I tend to prefer the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin and that handles rel=next & rel=prev out the box. All in One SEO may do this but it is not turned on by default.

Not to say there is no other duplication but that should certainly be enough to get you moving in the right direction and in all honesty, don't worry about this too much, just implement the best practice solutions and you will be good to go.

Hope this helps
Marcus

References

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/view-all-in-search-results.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/pagination-with-relnext-and-relprev.html

http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/video-about-pagination-with-relnext-and.html

[stayathomemum]

Marcus,

thank you for your in-depth and logical reply!

Most of our traffic is mobile so i'll take that into account.

cheers!

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey

No problem at all. I would check out the All in One SEO config page, see if it can implement the rel=prev and rel=next tags, if not, switch to Yoast SEO or utilise some other plugin that will do the job.

Also, the SEOMoz tool does not work with canonical URLs as of yet so this can generate some more false positives.

All in all, not a big issue and one that is easy to solve.

all the best!
Marcus