Duplicate meta + title tags in Google Webmaster Tools, SEO

[Nickless]

Hi all,

 

I'm having a big SEO issue regarding Duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags showing up in my Google Webmaster Tools.

My problem is a bit different than those described in http://www.prestasho...bles-important/ and http://www.prestasho...-ps-12-13-only/.

My problem is that Google is marking pages which are in two languages as duplicate even though those pages have the iso-lang tag in the URL!

 

I'm using two languages in my shop. English and Dutch (nl). As you can see in the second and third screenshot Google marks almost every product and categorypage that has two languages as duplicate.

So for example I have myshop.com/en/jewelry/102-productname is duplicate with myshop.com/nl/sieraden/102-productname (which are the same product but in different languages). All these pages are being marks as duplicated by Google which will surely be a major issue regarding SEO!

 

I've tried all the fixes described in the above postings and downloaden and installed two modules from Presto-Changeo but nothing is fixing it.

 

Help really appreciated!!

 

Kind regards,

-Dave

Edited May 12, 2012 by Nickless (see edit history)

[enihat]

any solution please?

my store link 118store.com

[Nickless]

I still don't have a solution.

Tried a lot of different suggestions I found in other topics but nothing worked.

Getting a bit frustrated...

[PrestaHeroes USA]

What I see is that you don't have different yourcategory/products product url friendly url's in difference languages. Do have different meta for each language?

[Nickless]

What I see is that you don't have different yourcategory/products product url friendly url's in difference languages. Do have different meta for each language?

 

Hi elpatron,

 

thanks for your reply.

I also see that I don't have a different URL for the products. Only the language/catergory name differce per language. For example; I have a www.myshop.com/en/bracelets for English and a www.myshop.com/nl/armbanden for Dutch language. The productname that comes after that stays the same for both languages.

I don't remember configuring this myself... Is this an Friendly URL thing?

Anyhow, thanks for showing me, maybe it'll put me on the right track!

 

Here is my .htaccess file. Maybe you can see a mistake I can't...

 

# .htaccess automaticaly generated by PrestaShop e-commerce open-source solution
# WARNING: PLEASE DO NOT MODIFY THIS FILE MANUALLY. IF NECESSARY, ADD YOUR SPECIFIC CONFIGURATION WITH THE HTACCESS GENERATOR IN BACK OFFICE
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[PrestaHeroes USA]

no need for .htaccess..they so ugly

 

simply edit your product, and expand your seo setting...

 

change all your seo stuff by language:

http://screencast.com/t/8EQqvGyq

[enihat]

Hi, I had the same problem and I managed fixing it,

 

If you want to keep all the languages, for each language you need to change each product's meta title and meta description and the Friendly URL

 

or

 

If you you want keep just one language; you can disable all other languages and you have to regenerate .htaccess but in this case you have to divert all other languages to the main language otherwise you will have crawl errors.

[Nickless]

Thanks elpatron,

the reason my URL wasn't changing was because of the URL redirect module from presto-changeo I installed.

Uninstalled and regenerated .htaccess and now my URL changes again with every language. So I'm hoping this will minimize my duplicate title tags.

But as you can see in the attached screenshots, all the info in the SEO part is different per language (same product). So I don't think that can be the reason for the duplicates in my Google Webmaster tools.

Am I correct in thinking the Short meta description in Google Webmaster tools is generated from the Short Description in Prestashop back office, just below the SEO settings? (last screenshot)

 

@enihat, also thanks for replying! I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this but I think this is the only option

But since tax-rules have changed per today in Holland (21% in stead of 19%) I have to change every product anyhow. So I'll change the SEO settings while I'm at it.

 

I'll report back if it worked.

 

regards

-Dave

[Nickless]

A small update:

 

11 days ago I started with 117 duplicate meta descriptions, 317 short meta descriptions and 226 duplicate title tags.

In the past 11 days I could see it slowely decreasing to where I now have 32 duplicate meta descriptions, 155 short meta descriptions and 79 duplicate title tags.

Not quite there yet but getting there.... (hopefully)

[prestacro]

Hi, I had the same problem and I managed fixing it,

 

If you want to keep all the languages, for each language you need to change each product's meta title and meta description and the Friendly URL

 

or

 

If you you want keep just one language; you can disable all other languages and you have to regenerate .htaccess but in this case you have to divert all other languages to the main language otherwise you will have crawl errors.

 

Hi!

I know you posted this long time ago but I had to leave just one language (and disable all others) and now i have lot of errors in webmaster tools.. Do you have any suggestion how to divert those other languages to default one?

Edited June 5, 2013 by prestacro (see edit history)

[Optimus_Sam]

Hi!

I know you posted this long time ago but I had to leave just one language (and disable all others) and now i have lot of errors in webmaster tools.. Do you have any suggestion how to divert those other languages to default one?

 

Same problem here! Anyone? :s

[Vilas]

Same issue on my website also

 

Can anyone know its solution. I have deleted all other languages except English but still same error.

 

Thanks

[peorthyr]

I personally have taken a different approach. since the duplicate titles on my site were caused by same language, but different locales, such as en-ca was same of en-us and en-uk, I've write a simple module (for prestashop 1.6) that insert in the hed of every product,category or cms page the "hareflang" rel=laternate meta link.

 

here is the module, hope that help someone:

hreflang module for prestashop 1.6

[john2]

I have same problem, In webmaster tools, duplicate titles are created, I thing such page are created through ping. 

[john2]

Duplicate meta description, titles, and content should be removed so that, right information could reach to the online users. 

[peorthyr]

Indeed they should be removed, but sometimes they are necessary, think about a product been sold in canada and australia, both will be in english, but there will be different currencies, and probably, different return policies, but all the rest will be the same. are those a duplicate? yes, for google, until you specify to it that thery are different locales for the same page.