If you’re a fan of the Google Search Console, you might find some errors in your dashboard when clicking the HTML improvement link under “Search appearance”. The big problem is that no one can give you the exact solution to fix the duplicate meta descriptions and title tags.
It happens that the same post appears multiple times, and only one link is working at the time. Basically, there are multiple causes for the duplicate meta description and title tags in your blog, each one is different, but I’ll try to cover all the possible situations.
Note: As Google update the Search Console interface, it’s easier now to find all your blog duplicate descriptions and title tags in one place. In the left area of the search console, you’ll need to click on the Coverage link. Then, scroll down to the bottom of the page where you can see Excluded followed by Duplicate, Google chose different canonical than the user. From there Google will list all the possible issues with duplicate content on your site.
Causes for the duplicate meta description and title tags
Modified post Title
This is a common issue in WordPress blogs, when you publish a post or page and change the title later, WordPress sends the new link to Google for crawling the blog. In this case, Google webmaster tools show a duplicate title.
However, that’s not even an error, you have updated the title and your blog have a single post with that title. So what happens with Google? It’s simply a matter of time, in a few days, Google will crawl the site again and found the updated title.
When you click all the duplicate links of your post, they take the visitor to the same page, that is the updated post. So, there are no multiple posts, in this case.
What you have to do is forget that error completely and in a period of a month at maximum, the old titles will be removed from Google, and only the newest version will be indexed.
Modified meta description
We all update some wrong words and mistakes from time to time, that happens. However, Google shows duplicate meta description, and that’s just a permanent error, come back in a few days or weeks and the duplicate errors will be removed. That happened to me many times, and you don’t have to worry about updating your post titles, or meta descriptions.
In the above case, you have to relax and forget the problem completely. It’s only a matter of patience with the Google system update.
Verify the above issues caused the problem?
To make sure that you don’t have a post duplication that appears in the Google webmaster tools, you need to search Google for that specific post. Please be specific as possible and type your post title as below:
Yourwebsite.com: post title or keyword here
If you see a single result related to that post URL, then, don’t worry, all is okay in that case. If you see multiple or doubled URLs, or post titles, then, you have a problem with duplicate content, and you need to follow the below steps:
Login to your WordPress admin area and click Tags under the Posts link. Then, type your duplicated tag that you need to verify.
For example, ” blogging tips”, and click “Search Tags”. If the tag is duplicated, you will get multiple versions as below:
- “blogging-tips”
- “blogging-tips-1”
In this case, the tag is duplicated and it will be listed with a number for each version. You need to modify one of them and keep the original one. Just hover over that tag, and click”Quick Edit”. Make sure to create a different name and slogan and save the changes by clicking the Update Tag button.
Now the duplicate tag was removed, and you can clear your blog cache if you’re using a caching plugin.
Other causes for duplicates in Google Search Console
If you are using a blogging platform, such as WordPress, the problem can be the junk data and files stored in the database. You need to make sure that a post that you delete should be disappeared completely from your database. The same thing applies to tags. What you need is to clean up and reduce the Database size.
If none of the above solutions worked for your site, then, you need to verify the post tables in the database. Search the exact post name that you need, and see if it’s a duplicate. If it’s the case, delete the old version and it’s done.
