It’s very essential to have original and unique title tags for every single page. Pages with duplicate title tags can make it more complicated for the search engine crawlers to decide which post to rank over others, ultimately result in a complicated process to rank content in the search result.
If you want your page to rank without confusion or without having them compete with one another, it’s incredibly important to create unique and relevant title tags.
To avoid duplicate tagging you need to utilize the additional content to target additional terms. Leveraging the hierarchy of content, cross-link, and tag appropriately is the key to avoid any negative effects because of duplicate title tags.
Google is all about original content. To keep your title tags unique, you will want to be specific about your page. Sometimes we mention our website name after page name separated by a dot or | which can also result in duplicate title tags, though it’s not always the case.
Here’s what Google said about duplicate <title> tags,
Your title provides users and search engines with useful information about your site. The text contained in title tags can appear in search results pages, and relevant, descriptive text is more likely to be clicked on. We recommend reviewing the list and updating the title tags wherever possible.
Source: Google
It’s also important to speed up your website performance if you want to rank higher in search engines, check this guide to know how you can make your website load in 2 seconds.
Now our task is to check for this issue on our website and if available fix them as soon as possible.
How to Detect Duplicate Title Tags?
Many online diagnosis tools request your domain URL, check, and display what is right with the website and where you need to put the effort to correct a few things.
In this tutorial, I am using ubersuggest to debug this website. You can also use tools like Google search console, SEMrush to benchmark your website. In the case of ubersuggest look for a website audit option and provide your domain URL to get the website benchmarking result.
In the image above you can see that the page title is [Blogging – WPblogging] where Blogging is a category and WPblogging is the name of the website. But since the category has lots of posts they are segmented into six (6) pages in a sequence.
In the example: (What is happening…)
- https://wpblogging.in/category/blogging (Title tag: Blogging – WPblogging)
- https://wpblogging.in/category/blogging/page/2/ (Title tag: Blogging – WPblogging)
We need to make sure that each of these pages has unique title tags so the search engines can identify each page individually rather than skipping them. To fix this issue I am going to use the RankMath SEO plugin. However, you can use Yoast or any other preferred SEO tool available for WordPress.
The reason for using an SEO tool is the ability to change Global configuration for title tags so that you don’t have to customize each page title tags manually. That would be time-consuming if you have a lot’s page with this error.
Fix Duplicate Title Tags With RankMath Plugin
#1. Install an SEO plugin
First thing, if you do not have any SEO plugin installed go to the WordPress repository and download an SEO plugin, hopefully, the RankMath plugin to follow this guide. RankMath is a great SEO plugin that improves your site’s overall SEO performance, and it’s free to use.
Check this guide, if you don’t know how to install a plugin in WordPress.
#2. Find out the title & meta configuration
After the plugin activation, you will see Rank Math on your WordPress admin dashboard. Click on Rank Math and find “Tittles and Meta“. You should find this option like this,
Now on the Rank Math dashboard, you will see a couple of options related to meta tags like Global meta, Local meta, Post meta, Page meta where you don’t need to configure anything because they are not the reason for our issue. We need to go for the category and tags meta configuration under the post section.
#3. Search for category title & meta configuration
#4. Figure out what dynamic component can be added in the title tag
Now to make the title tags unique for every single page under a specific category we can mention the page number with the title. Something like this,
[Example Page – WPblogging] + (page 2 of 4)
Then the title will look like this,
Example Page – Wpblogging page 2 of 4 (Where 2 is the 2nd page of total 4 pages in that category)
… and for every page, it will dynamically change if we configure it in the SEO plugin (Rank Math for this tutorial)
#5. Add page number for each page under same category
To mention the page number in the title tag add %page% both in the page title and description. Since you are using the %page% which is a callback function the page numbers will automatically change according to the page sequence.
#6. Verify your fixing
When the configuration is complete, clear your website cache and verifies the title tags on your own browser.
- Load any category that has articles on more than one page.
- Check the Title by hovering your cursor on the browser TAB’s title.
- Now navigate to the next page and check if the title is the same as the previous page or not?
- If the titles are not the same then you should not have this issue again.
- Still, check for the previous warnings with the site benchmarking tool.
Make sure your title format follows this format Category name – Site Name – Page Number. You can use your own format as well but having these three components provide a better outcome.
Wrapping up: Duplicate title tags is a common issue in most websites. We normally do not lookout for this kind of issue but the impact of such issues on SEO is high, so it’s better to fix them as soon as you detect them. Hope this guide helps you and let us know about anything regarding this article in the comment.