Are my duplicate meta titles and descriptions an issue ?

[GardenBeet]

HelloMy website http://www.gardenbeet.com has been rebuilt using prestacart and there are 158 duplicate title and meta descriptions being reported by google.My developer advised the following Almost all the duplicates are due to the same page being accessible at the root and following the category heading. e.g;

/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html
/patio-planters/75-vegetable-patio-planter-turquoise.html

This is hard-wired into PrestaShop. Was the Canonical module (now disabled) responsible for the confusion by not including the category name?

The Googlebot shouldn't be scanning the root versions now. I don't believe this to be a serious issue but I'd recommend a second opinion from someone more SEO savvy just to be sure.Opinions??

[Marcus_Miller]

Hey, you essentially have two URLs pointing to exactly the same page so you have an issue here. Exactly why prestashop is configured like that I don't know but it's certainly not going to help you long term and you need to get this sorted.

I guess you have a couple of options.

1. Reconfigure prestashop so it only maintains one unique URL for each page & 301 redirect the ones you remove to the new one to pick up any search referrals and transfer any link value

2. add a canonical URL to both versions of the page pointing to the main version of the page.

I just did a quick google and this seems to be an oft discussed topic on the prestashop forums so there is likely a tried and tested solution out there. As this is specific to that content management system I would suggest looking there for the solution as there is likely something you can do in the configuration of prestashop to sort this out.

You mentioned that you disabled the canonical plugin - why was this? Was it pointing to the correct versions of the pages (the categorised ones)? If so, putting that back in place may solve the issue and I would be happy to take a look under at the source code for you to confirm this.

Not exactly an answer,  but I think the answer  is likely simple and in the prestashop configuration of the disabled canonical module.

Let me know if I can help!
Marcus

[GardenBeet]

thanks - i dont know why it was disabled - it probably caused another problem - we have had many!! will give reply to developer and see what he says

appreciate your time