Author Topic: Duplicate Title Tags  (Read 9091 times)

mrmckeen

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Duplicate Title Tags
« on: 25 October 2008, 13:41 »
I don't know if SEF Advanced can help me with this or not (maybe I don't have a setting correct).  Google WebCentral reports that I have 1,400 Duplicate Content Tags.  They most come from the list of categories under a section (see screeshot below).  So I assume when Googlebot crawls the site it sees each page of content listings as a new page but with the same Title Tag on the page.  Does that make sense?

If that is the problem is there anyway to fix it?

Thanks very much!!

Saka

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #1 on: 25 October 2008, 16:35 »
You would get the same result even if SEF Advance wasn't installed.
So maybe you can install some plugin to alter the titles on different pages, or hack the core to do so, if you think that's a big problem.

mrmckeen

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #2 on: 25 October 2008, 16:52 »
Thanks very much for the quick reply.  In your experience does this hurt your Google rank in the search engine?

*Salvo*

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #3 on: 25 October 2008, 20:29 »
Of course yes, a bit.
If Google has a cache with the all 'old' urls, and now you submit the new url's setting (eg. with a sitemap), this is the result.
It doesn't mean that this depends from Sef Advance, but from the new architecture that google needs time to crawl, accept and takes as definitive url. You need time to have a great result. But really great.
In addition Sef Advance will hold 'alive' the all backlinks if some site still point to a content of your old style url.
From FAQ, the main things I've followed are:

configure your Sef Advance (without enabling any cache)

be sure that the setting works and is valid checking components and so on.

enable cache

Tags like alt and h1 are very important, even if maybe in some case you have to hack your template.css
...............................................................


Saka

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #4 on: 26 October 2008, 17:03 »
You could, of course, add manual alias to each of such links and define different title with SEF Advance. Maybe I could add a setting to SEF Advance later on to automatically alter titles for pages with pagination, if this shows to be important for SEO. I don't know how important it is, would love to hear some expert opinions.
« Last Edit: 26 October 2008, 17:10 by Saka »

ekal

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #5 on: 27 October 2008, 15:34 »
Hi Guys

My view is that the problem is not Joomla or SEF Advance but pagination itself.

After all, what is the point of pagination? Does anyone say "I really want to go to page 68 of the blog?" No - they use the search.

Even if they do go to page 68, what would a good title be? "Sakic.net Blog - Page 68"? The content changes all the time so we can't find a good page title for changing content.

I think the best pagination is simply Next / Previous or just leaving it out entirely.
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Saka

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #6 on: 27 October 2008, 19:45 »
Hi Steve,

Thanks. I agree with you.
But even if you simply have Prev / Next you would still get different URLs for different pages in Joomla and you would again end up with duplicate titles. Do you think these duplicate titles hurt the page rank of the site?

What would you think the solution would be? Maybe using AJAX pagination where URL would remain the same (with just a different anchor)? Then Google should not treat them as different pages.
Like in my gallery:
http://joomla.sakic.net/the-news/latest-news/ajax-photo-album/#1
http://joomla.sakic.net/the-news/latest-news/ajax-photo-album/#4
etc.

Thanks again for the SEO expert insight.
« Last Edit: 29 October 2008, 17:50 by Saka »

cazzani

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #7 on: 28 October 2008, 17:55 »
Just to expand a little bit on this (useful) topic, some of the "Duplicate Title Tags" (and "Duplicated Meta Descriptions", too) warnings generated by Google Webmaster Tools are indeed caused by SEF Advance if your site use the 'Print icon'.

What happens is that if you have the Print icon enabled in your articles, SEF Advance gently tranforms the links of the pages in www.yoursite.it/section/category/article but it also add the url www.yoursite.it/section/category/article/print to the printer friendly version of it.

I think this is very useful but Google does not like it too much.
Fortunately, there is a very simple solution to it.

Just add this line to your robots.txt file
Code: [Select]
Disallow: /*print$
and be patient. It took Google a couple of months on my site to remove the undesidered printer frienfly versions from the index and the corresponding Duplicate Title/Description warnings.

Stefano

damo

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #8 on: 29 April 2009, 15:51 »
I quite like this post - maybe a dedicated post for robots.txt will be handy on this forum ..

Anyway, I found adding

Disallow: /index.php

A handy one too as I was getting lots of error messages from URL's that started that way and with SEF Advance you don't really want Google indexing anything starting with index.php

Only my 2p

PHI

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #9 on: 12 January 2010, 18:40 »
We are having this same issue. It is not an SEF Advance issue, but I would be willing to pitch in for a patch or something. We have a blog on our site and webmaster tools also shows duplicate title errors. I don't want to have to manually add the titles because every time you tweak something, there is a potential to spin off a different error in webmaster tools. Is there a way to do something that either just ads a page number or a post range:

Our first page of our blog is at:
http://www.apartmentsphoenix.com/phoenix-for-rent-blog/news/

if you scroll down and go to page two it is:
http://www.apartmentsphoenix.com/phoenix-for-rent-blog/news/5/

Can SEF Advance rewrite based on the number appended "Blog Name - Page 2" or "Blog Name - Posts Dated xx-xx-xxxx - xx-xx-xxxx". That is all that would be required to avoid the error in Webmaster Tools. I guess technically it could even just append the number from the end of the URL, nobody is really looking at each title page of your blog. The slickest thing would be to take the first keyword from each blog on that page and add it to the title, but that would be way outside of the scope of this component.

To add to cazzani's comment about adding the disallow, it does take months, but you can also add the individual pages you are getting errors with to your robots.txt for a few months and tell Google to remove them in Webmaster Tools and they are gone in a couple of days, but if you don't add the individual pages on there for a few months, they will return after 60 or 90 days I forget which.

Saka

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #10 on: 12 January 2010, 19:42 »
OK, as I see it becomes important issue I will have a look if it can be added to SEF Advance.

PHI

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #11 on: 13 January 2010, 00:24 »
As always, you are one of the true stars of Joomla!  ;D

Saka

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #12 on: 13 January 2010, 04:30 »
It's ready for J1.5 version. Download the latest version (2.2.0) and you will find a new option under the SEO tab called "Append Page Number".
When set to Yes, it will append page number to title for paginated content. In blog view you will end up with e.g. "Document Title - Page 2".
« Last Edit: 13 January 2010, 04:35 by Saka »

riga75

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #13 on: 13 January 2010, 15:37 »
It's ready for J1.5 version. Download the latest version (2.2.0) and you will find a new option under the SEO tab called "Append Page Number".
When set to Yes, it will append page number to title for paginated content. In blog view you will end up with e.g. "Document Title - Page 2".


wonderfull, it's fantastic

riga75

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Re: Duplicate Title Tags
« Reply #14 on: 26 January 2010, 18:29 »
There is a small bug in the component: If I put the title different from the name of the class the component does not put more page 1, page 2 etc etc

stefano