Are you looking to fix duplicate meta descriptions and titles in your WordPress blog?
Do you know duplicate meta descriptions and titles hurt your search engine ranking?
Even blog’s on-page SEO is great, many beginners missed out to fix duplicate meta descriptions and titles issue in their blog pagination.
What is Pagination?
Pagination is the page number that separates your website contain into multiple pages located at the top or button of the website.
How do Pagination Hurt your Blog Ranking?
Pagination contains duplicate meta descriptions and titles. When you see the audit reports of your website, one of the issue you may find is duplicate contains in pagination . Search engine such as Google, Bing and Yandex find difficult to pick relevant contain from your website to rank. As a result you may lose potential customers.
How to Fix Pagination Issues?
You can easily fix pagination duplicate meta descriptions and titles issue in your WordPress blog using Yoast SEO plugin. If you are already using Yoast SEO plugin then you can easily configure the plugin and fix duplicate issue in pagination adding %%page%% variable from your WordPress dashboard.
- Step-1: Audit your Website.
- Step-2: Fix Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Titles Issues.
- Fixing in Homepage.
- Fixing in Categories.
In this tutorial you will learn how to fix duplicate meta descriptions and titles in pagination using Yoast SEO plugin.
Step-1: Audit your Website.
You can audit your site for free to find out website issues that is hurting your blog ranking such as duplicate meta descriptions and titles.
There are many free and paid online tools available for site audit. One of the free tool you can use to audit your website is SEO Analyzer by Neil Patel. It is the powerful tool that helps you to find major blog issues and recommend methods to fix the issues which will definitely increase your blog visibility in search engine such as Google, Bing and Yandex.
Open Neil’s website on your browser using this link SEO Analyzer. In the box type your website URL and click on Analyze website button.
Depending on the size of your blog it may take 1-3 minutes to show your blog’s reports. You will see your blog performance and errors report. As in the below reports you can see there are 4 pages with duplicate title. So the duplicate issue are in <title> tags, let start fixing.
Click on the link e.g. 4 pages to see the details of affected URL. You can see in the report below the duplicate title is in homepage pagination e.g. page/2/, page/3/ and page/4/.
Step-2: Fix Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Titles Issues
Fix in Homepage
You can fix this issue using Yoast SEO plugin in your WordPress blog. Login to WordPress dashboard and click on search appearance under SEO.
In General tab you will find homepage SEO title and meta description box. Add %%page%% variable clicking on insert snippet variable at the right and pressing P key. From variable list click on page which will add the page variable in the SEO title.
You also have to add the %%page%% variable in homepage meta description box at the end of your description then click on save change.
You are done. You have successfully fixed duplicate titles issue from your website.
Site Audit tool will take few days to update the change. Audit your site after few days you will be find no duplicate titles issue in homepage pagination.
Fix in Categories
You may see duplicate meta description issue in categories pagination. Again, login to WordPress dashboard and click on search appearance under SEO. Click on Taxonomies tab you will see categories section where you have to add page variable (%%page%%) in SEO title and meta description as same as you have added in General tab.
You can add the %%page%% variable clicking on insert snippet variable at the right and pressing P key. You will see variable list where you have to select page which will add the page variable in the title.
You have added the %%page%% variable in the title now you have to add the same in meta description box at the end of your description.
Click on insert snippet variable and press P key then click on page which will add %%page%% variable in meta descriptions. This will avoid duplication meta description issue in categories pagination.
We hope this tutorial on how to fix duplicate meta descriptions and titles in WordPress is helpful. You may also like to see the guide on how to add website to bing webmaster tools to drive more traffic.
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