Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Tags - How to Solve the Webmaster Error

Blogging seems to be an easy task to everyone but understanding how to put the right script in the blog template is the most challenging problem that most bloggers face once they encounter any problem that need scripting. One of the most common problems is duplicate title tags or duplicate metatags which shows up in the Google webmaster diagnostic tool.

If you are familiar with Webmaster tool, there are strict guidelines that one needs to follows when writing any blog article; which I have listed in my article 7 Common Mistakes that can Lead to Your Blog Getting Penalized and failure to follow these guidelines or policy, search engine like Google and Yahoo may consider your blog suspicious or deceiving which can lead to penalization. These include having duplicate Title tags or Meta tags among others.

The reason why we find errors of duplication has something to do with what we add in the Meta tag template. When we add a Meta tag to a template, the Meta tag is simply used to represent the entire blog rather than the main or home page. It is copied to all posts in your blog. This lead to Google assuming that your pages have the same content which is been caused by Meta tags.

How to solve Duplicate Title Tags and Meta Tags Errors

• Go to Blogger Dashboard
• Template 
• Edit HTML
• Proceed

 

Using Ctrl +F, search for the following code:

<meta content="Your Blog  here" name="description"/>

Found immediately after head tag and replace it with the following code:

 

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
< meta content="Your Blog Here" name="description"/>

< /b:if>

The ‘if" condition will allow it to be displayed on the homepage only but not in all posts. Don’t forget to save your template. Note that in "Your Blog Here" is where you put your actual blog description.

The next problem that is responsible for the duplicate title and content is because Google index posts and comments separately. When indexing comments, it indexes the page posts once again leading to duplicate. Read more on how to google site search.

Go to Blogger – Dashboard – Design - Edit HTML, click on "Expand Widget Templates"

Use Ctrl +F to search in the template for the following code:

<a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'>
< data:comment.timestamp/>
< /a>

Replace the entire code with following longer code:

 

<b:if cond='data:post.commentPagingRequired'>
< a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'> <data.comment.timestamp/> </a>
< b:else/>
< a expr:href='data:blog.url + &quot;#&quot; + data:comment.anchorName' title='comment permalink'> <data:comment.timestamp/> </a>
< /b:if>

 

You are done. Relax and leave the rest to Google. You will be able to see changes within one or two weeks after rectifying the problem.