Duplicate Title Tags

[ken]

Hi.

I’m receiving some warnings from Google of duplicate title tags on several pages

mentions.php
new-products.php
best-sales.php
conditions.php
etc.

All these pages use the ‘default’ title tags from
Back Office >> Preferences >>Appearance – meta title

Has anyone found a solution to this?

Thanks.

Ken

[ken]

No Comments!!!!! :bug:

This problem Will Affect Your Page Ranking. Google does not like Pages with duplicate meta descriptions

The manufacturer’s links have the same problem.


Ken.

[stampy]

Hi

Sorry to hijack the thread Ken, but I am also concerned with this issue. I've got 10 pages all with the same meta descriptions because the are using the default title tags fromBack Office >> Preferences >>Appearance – meta title.

Surely this is causing a problem for everyone?

[ken]

Hi Stampy

My idea for starting this thread was to try to find all the duplicates before posting as a bug (or feature request) report.

It appears (so far) to be just these

mentions.php
new-products.php
best-sales.php
conditions.php
secure-payment.php‎
sitemap.php‎
manufacturer.php‎

Plus any new pages created

sitemap.php especially needs fixing.

Please post them here if you find any more.

The ‘fix’ should be simple, we just need to add the filename to the tag.

Regards

Ken.

[stampy]

Hi Ken

I've got the same ones as you, plus:

prices-drop.php
contact-form.php
about-us.php
supplier.php

Regards,

Stampy

[andrew]

Ken,

I also have:

/search.php?tag=xxxx

where xxxx = various tags

- Andrew

[ken]

Hi Andrew

Thanks for that one.

Search.php is a little different from the rest as it really serves no useful purpose in Google. Probably The best thing to do with this one is to block Google from accessing it.

Add

Disallow: /search.php

To robots.txt and Google will not spider it.

Regards.

Ken.

[andrew]

Thanks Ken,

made that change.

- Andrew

[stampy]

Ken

Can you explain what I need to do fix this issue?

Thanks a lot,

Stampy

[ken]

Hi Stampy

I have reported this as a bug and so it will, hopefully, be fixed in V1.1

In the meantime you could just leave things as they are as it will not prevent your site from being spidered.

Quote from Google -
While we were crawling your site, we noticed some issues with the content of your pages. These issues won't prevent your site from appearing in Google search results, but paying attention to them can provide Google with more information and even help drive traffic to your site. For example, title and meta description text can appear in search results, and useful, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on by users

or block Google from looking at them by adding them to the robots.txt

Add a disallow for each file to be blocked

Eg.

Disallow: /prices-drop.php
Disallow: /contact-form.php
Disallow: /about-us.php
Disallow: /supplier.php

Regards

Ken

[stampy]

Ok, thanks Ken, appreciate you responding so quicky.

[nutbuster]

You will also want to remove them from Google's cashe.....I mentioned this on another post but thought I would post it here as well...

The best way I found to handle this is to place the url’s you want to stop Google from indexing/cashe is to place then in your Robot.txt file in the root directory. Then you will want to log on to Google Webtools then click on Site configuration then click on Crawler Access then click on Remove URL and follow the prompts….there is a box there that ask if you removed the link with Robot.txt…which in my case I did. On the next crawl Google will remove these old/unneeded urls and you should see the results in your Webtools Dashboard.