Showing Duplicate Content in Webmaster Tools.

[EcommerceSite]

About 6 weeks ago we completely redid our entire site. The developer put in 302 redirects. We were showing thousands of duplicate meta descriptions and titles. I had the redirects changed to 301. For a few weeks the duplicates slowly went down and now they are right back to where they started. Isn't the point of 301 redirects to show Google that content has permanently been moved? Why is it not picking this up? I knew it would take some time but I am right where I started after a month.

[gmk1567]

First you need to check if multiple URLs displayed under each title are working and rendering different pages.

Sometimes redirect may have syntax issues. Post your result to discuss other options.

[EcommerceSite]

They all render the same page. One goes to the page it is supposed to and the other redirects to the correct page. This is the behavior I want to happen.

[MikeRoberts]

Sometimes it can take a while for Google to show things correctly in the SERPs and for a time you may wind up with duplication warnings because there is the older, cached page still showing in the index along with the new page that the older one redirects to. In cases like this I usually jump into webmaster tools, fetch the old page (which I know redirects to the new one) and do a crawl request/submit to index to ensure that Google sees it and indexes it correctly sooner than it may have naturally. Now, I'm not 100% certain that it will fix your issue but I can say that it can potentially help and can't do any harm in this instance.

[TommyTan]

Hi,

I had a similar problem but i found duplicate title tags through another tool but very similar to Google Webmasters.  Although you did 301 redirects to new pages and thats the right thing to do but I believe from that tool, they are still picking up the title tag and meta descriptions from the old pages.  I also don't know why.  There are two ways to approach this.

1. Go to your old pages and simply remove all the title tags and meta descriptions

2. Go to your new pages and change the title tag and meta description.  Optimize it even more than what you used to have on your old pages.  Add secondary keywords to the title tag? Change up the meta description with CTA?

Maybe you should also check to make sure that all of them are 301 redirects and not 302.  Furthermore, do you have www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com?  These are considered two different sites and might be the reason.

Hope this helps.

[EcommerceSite]

I have over 3000 in both meta descriptions and titles so that might take awhile.

[EcommerceSite]

I have over 3000 in both meta descriptions and titles so that might take awhile.

[EcommerceSite]

There are over 3000 for both meta descriptions and titles so to remove individually could take some time.

The title tag and meta descriptions are all new. We did completely new ones when we redid the site.

We checked and they are all 301's instead of 302s. Originally they were 302s but we changed that. It start dropping steadily and was down to about 1300. But all of a sudden it jumped back up to 3000 some, exactly what I was at before. So I am back to square one.

[MikeRoberts]

Okay, in that case I wouldn't suggest manually fetching and submitting 3000 links one by one because that would be a complete waste of time. You could always make sure to update your sitemap and then add that in Optimization>Sitemap or choose to Resubmit the current sitemap (hoping that that will lead to Google re-crawling sooner) and/or fetch some changed pages and submit to index as "URL and all linked pages".

Otherwise I'd say wait... SEO is a long-term job. It's only been 6 weeks since you re-did your site and less than that since you switched everything over from 302s to 301s. Give it some more time and you'll see Google start showing the correct pages and removing any unnecessary duplicate content warnings.

[EcommerceSite]

We have the sitemap setup ok. For some reason only 50% of my sitemap is being indexed. Any ideas?

[MikeRoberts]

Hmm... not totally sure on why only half of your sitemap is being indexed. Likely its a mixture of a number of factors including (but not limited to) site age, NoIndex tags, Google not crawling deep enough, lack of inbound links to deep pages, etc. etc. From what I've seen though, Google will eventually get to all/most of the pages in your sitemap and will eventually swap out your older pages for the 301'd/canonicalized pages that you want showing in the SERPs. Take into account some of the other tips people are sharing here because it may be a mix of our suggestions that will ultimately work for you.

[TommyTan]

Yea, 3000 pages will take a while.

The title tags and meta descriptions are all new, does that mean it is different from the old pages?  If it is, then it shouldn't be duplicate.

[EcommerceSite]

It shouldn't be duplicate but for some reason it is. We did entirely new tags and descriptions for everything. It recently dropped a little more so I hope we are moving into the right direction.

[EcommerceSite]

The site has been around for over 10 years, and we do not have any noindex. I am starting to see it drop but two months seems like a long time to start seeing changes.