: Duplicate meta title and description displayed in Google Webmaster Tools In Google Webmaster Tools under Search Appearance --> HTML Improvements it's showing: Duplicate Meta Titles - 166 Duplicate

@Becky754

Google uses the titles and descriptions found in your webpages to display a title and description in the snippet it returns in its search results, as illustrated in number 1 below:



If titles and descriptions are duplicates from page to page, then search results will appear the same to users. Therefore, Google requires them to be unique.

To remove these warnings, you'll need to provide unique content in the title and description meta tags within the head section of each page. Each title and description should reflect the content that can be found on that page, as can be read more about here: Google Webmaster Tools: Site title and description

If the pages with duplicate titles and descriptions contain the same content and you do not need all of them to be indexed, then you can let Google know this by indicating one preferred page to index by adding a canonical URL to the head section of each page so that it points to the preferred one.

For example, if the preferred URL to index is /musical-instruments-2, then the link to add to the head section would be:

<link rel="canonical" href="http://www.example.com/musical-instruments-2"/>


Alternatively, you can chose to block pages containing duplicate titles and descriptions from being indexed by using the following meta tag in them, as covered here: Google Webmaster Tools - Using meta tags to prevent robots from indexing a page on your site.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">


Or you can block entire directories like /musical-instruments-2 from being crawled by adding this to your robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /musical-instruments-2


After you're done making one of the above corrections, request that Google crawls your site again by using the Fetch as Google tool. It may take some time however for Google Webmaster Tools to reflect these changes.

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