Some time ago I wrote the
on-page SEO guide for new webmasters
where I show the basic principles of internal SEO and one of the sections of this guide was the title of the articles. In this article I will focus on
how to prevent duplicate titles in WordPress
as it is something that can give us problems and even become penalized by
Google Panda
.
Many of you will be thinking that it is practically impossible to have duplicate titles because you never write the same article twice and that is partly true, but in blogs that have a staff of editors controlling duplicate titles may not be so simple. I will also show you those sites within your WordPress website where it is more common to find duplicate titles.
How to prevent duplicate titles in WordPress
The way we will all be thinking is that before publishing a new entry do a search and see if there is an entry with an equal or similar title.
The previous form would be the manual method, but recently a new plugin has been published in the WordPress repository that checks if the title already exists and in case of information it notifies us and also does not let us publish the entry. The plugin is called
Duplicate Title Validation
and is completely free.
It seems to me a pretty good plugin for blogs with a lot of content or with a very extensive editor template that will help you choose a suitable title for your entries.
Parts of our website where it is more common to find duplicate titles.
When a WordPress blog already has a considerable number of entries, the tags or categories show a list of entries with their pagination. Well, in these pages of the same label, of the same category or of the same author is where you most frequently find duplicate titles. To avoid them, it is enough to have an SEO plugin installed that is responsible for controlling these titles. Personally I use WordPress SEO by Yoast and in the
SEO → TÃtulos y etiquetas → TaxonomÃas
section
SEO → TÃtulos y etiquetas → TaxonomÃas
adjust the title template as follows:
%%term_title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
With that code, what I get when I put
%%page%%
is that I add the pagination to the title thus obtaining unique titles. In the case of the template for the author titles I have it configured as follows:
%%name%%, Autor en %%sitename%% %%page%%
As you can see I put
%%page%%
to have unique titles on each page of each author's file.
This section is based on my experience and surely many of you will find duplicate titles in other parts of your WordPress blog, if so I encourage you to leave a comment.