Wordpress Blog Pages, Duplicate Title Tag

[ProductPearson]

Hi James,

Archive pages do not provide much benefit at all in search engines:

1. If they are a single author website, they will be the same content as your homepage/author page/archive page/category pages.

2. As they are archives of existing content, none of the content is unique

I personally have them disabled, and it is common that other sites do as well, especially ones based on Wordpress

I find it is better to have a date based archive which you can then have indexed, as this provides a unique outlook. Mashable does this:

http://mashable.com/2013/12/

and so do we:

http://searchbuzz.co/archive/

This is of course just a personal approach and avoids the duplicate title issue.

If you want to keep the archive pages for usability, but stop them appearing in search results, simply noindex those pages, Yoast can do that for you - you can also use Yoast to rename the page title to something different so the title is never a duplicate, so it physically adds "Page 2 of 50" or something in the title tag of the page.

Ash

[celilcan2]

Are you using all in one seo or yoast plugin?

[Antony_Towle]

Thanks,

Well the blog is setup sort of like an archive of past posts and news,

I have disabled tags index (dont use them anyway), date archive is disabled and only use Categories but only for usability for readers and these category indexes are set to no index anyway to avoid duplication,

So the articles index of pages 2 and upwards are all unique as everything else is no index,

I don't want to have all of my articles indexed listed onto page 1 as that wouldn't be good for my users,

So really i just need to reword the title tags of pages 2 and upwards to make them unique

James

[Antony_Towle]

Oh and i have always used Yoast,

Why would All in one resolve this ?

Can they be used in conjunction ? i assume not i could see that causing problems ?

[ProductPearson]

Don't use both - just use Yoast and add %%page%% to the Archive title, and it will add the page number, therefore removing the duplicate title tag issue as nothing will be the same.

[Antony_Towle]

That should do the trick, will try that

Thanks

James

[ProductPearson]

No problem, remember to also add %%sep%% so it adds a seperator, so example:

%%term_title%% %%sep%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%

would appear as:

category name - Page 2 of 50 - domain name

of course, domain name and the final seperator are optional.

[Antony_Towle]

I have included Sitename and Sep also,

Thank you,

[celilcan2]

This post is deleted!

[Antony_Towle]

Thanks,

Looks useful,

James

[tfanelli7306]

I am having this same problem, and I don't understand the instructions here for how to fix it.

If I go to edit category and add the code to the title, it just adds the code (character for character) to the url and still gives me /page/2 after. I still have a duplicate title.

If I go to Yoast SEO settings - titles and metas and go over to the archive tab, there is nothing for category archive. Only author and date.

Where do I put this code?

[formerfatguy]

It's in the Yoast settings Thomas.  Titles & Meta's >> Taxonomies

I'm astounded I had never thought of this as the solution to my own issue.  Thanks to everyone above.