Pagination & Duplicate Page Title

[moon-boots]

I was under the impression that pagination resolved duplicate page title issues with Google, but Moz is flagging them up as duplicates. Is this just a case of Moz not being able to understand pagination or am I missing something?

i.e. correctly formatted pagination: http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

[tawnycase]

Hi there! Tawny from Moz's Customer Support team here. 
Pages are considered by our tools to have duplicate titles only if their titles are exact matches. There is no notion of overlapping or partial matches for this purpose. Like duplicate content, canonical versions should be considered, but not pages that refer to the canonical version. Furthermore, two pages with blank titles should not be considered duplicates of one another.

​It's entirely possible that Google is sophisticated enough to recognize pagination and not see duplicate page titles, but our tools will still have this issue if the page's title tags are identical.

You can verify the page title by viewing the source code of the page itself. I hope this helps! Feel free to give us a shout at help@moz.com if you have any other questions or if there's anything that needs clarifying!

[moon-boots]

Hello Tawny,

The pages in question are correctly canonicalised, so why would it appear on your tools?

As you can see below, both have the correct canonicalised url (referring to their page number) as well as pagination. I can see no reason for them to be flagged up as duplicates?

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/3

http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/4

[tawnycase]

In this case, it looks like it could be two things: a formatting issue, and the fact that these pages are canonicalized to themselves. Here's the canonical tag as it appears on http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/3:

href="http://thespacecollective.com/space-memorabilia/page/3/" rel="canonical" />

From looking at https://moz.com/learn/seo/canonicalization, it looks like that's sort of backwards from how canonical tags are normally formatted:

I think it's possible that if you switched the formatting around, you might see these duplicate title issues stop showing up.

[moon-boots]

As I understand it, they should be canonicalised to themselves so that all duplicate pages are automatically canonicalised by Opencart.

As for the backwards issue, THANK YOU! I didn't notice that and I don't know why this would be. I hope that by changing the format as instructed it will resolve the issue!

[Kevin_P]

Did your update fix the issue? I'm experiencing the same problem where Moz is marking paginated pages as "duplicate title" even if they are canonicalised to themselves and use prev and next tags.

[Compass_Media]

I am also having this same issue where I am receiving a duplicate title error for paginated pages even though they have canonical urls set and use the prev and next tags. Is there a solution for this?