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    4. Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist

    Duplicate Content Warning For Pages That Do Not Exist

    Intermediate & Advanced SEO
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    • southcoasthost
      southcoasthost last edited by

      Hi Guys I am hoping someone can help me out here.

      I have had a new site built with a unique theme and using wordpress as the CMS. Everything was going fine but after checking webmaster tools today I noticed something that I just cannot get my head around.

      Basically I am getting warnings of Duplicate page warnings on a couple of things. 1 of which i think i can understand but do not know how to get the warning to go.

      Firstly I get this warning of duplicate meta desciption

      url 1: /

      url 2: /about/who-we-are

      I understand this as the who-we-are page is set as the homepage through the wordpress reading settings. But is there a way to make the dup meta description warning disappear

      The second one I am getting is the following:

      /services/57/

      /services/

      Both urls lead to the same place although I have never created the services/57/ page

      the services/57/ page does not show on the xml sitemap but Google obviously see it because it is a warning in webmaster tools.

      If I press edit on services/57/ page it just goes to edit the /services/ page/ is there a way I can remove the /57/ page safely or a method to ensure Google at least does not see this.

      Probably a silly question but I cannot find a real comprehensive answer to sorting this.

      Thanks in advance

      1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
      • irvingw
        irvingw last edited by

        Add canonical tags to your pages this is a must with wordpress category pages and tag pages etc.

        somewhere on your site google is crawling and indexing/seeing services/57 which is really services/  - but without the canonical added to services/ google doesn't know that is the page that should be considered the representative page.

        install the YOAST seo plugin for wordpress, install it and configure it to properly add canonical tags and noindex tags. it's really easy takes like 10 minutes after you instal and activate it

        if this helped you out please feel free to thumbs up or mark as good answer! if you send me the URL i can take a closer look for you

        1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 1
        • southcoasthost
          southcoasthost last edited by

          Hi,

          Thanks for the reply. the problem with the canonical is that I cannot edit the services/57/ page with wordpress because as soon as I click edit it goes to edit the /services/ page.

          For the yoast canonical to work i would need to add in the real url into the /57/ page of which I cant do , or am i wrong there?

          The problem also is that I can add any number apart from /57/ and they all lead back to /services/. At the moment Google has only indexed both /services/ and /service/57/

          Thanks

          1 Reply Last reply Reply Quote 0
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