WordPress.org

1. Chief Editor
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Dear all

   please help me:

   I did few changes in my site yourstoryclub.com and after these changes google webmaster tool is giving html meta description and meta title duplication suggestions. Changes I did:

   I already had All in One SEO enabled before these changes and is still there

   (1) Moved my wp installation to root i.e. from yourstoryclub.com/wpstoryblog/ to yourstoryclub.com/

   (2) added following code in .htaccess at yourstoryclub.com/
   

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   rewriterule ^wpstoryblog(/.*)? $1 [L,R=301]

   (3) enable permalink to /%category%/%postname%/

   (4) Install hypercache plugin

   now my .htaccess at yourstoryclub.com/ looks like:
   

   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   rewriterule ^wpstoryblog(/.*)? $1 [L,R=301]
   
   # BEGIN WordPress
   <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
   RewriteEngine On
   RewriteBase /
   RewriteRule ^index\.php$ - [L]
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
   RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
   </IfModule>
   
   # END WordPress

   And google suggest meta duplication for all posts (3x each) - one example:
   

   http://yourstoryclub.com/?p=609
   http://yourstoryclub.com/short-stories-love/love-note-after-twelve-years/
   http://yourstoryclub.com/wpstoryblog/?p=609

   if I go to all the above 3 links, it takes me to same page:
   http://yourstoryclub.com/short-stories-love/love-note-after-twelve-years/

   thank you all in advance for helping me out

2. Chief Editor
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Dear experts, pls help me

3. Vanguard Digital
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   1) I would try this in your robots txt file to disallow random crawling by google

   User-agent: *
   Disallow: /cgi-bin
   Disallow: /wp-admin
   Disallow: /wp-includes
   Disallow: /wp-content/plugins
   Disallow: /wp-content/cache
   Disallow: /wp-content/themes
   Disallow: /trackback
   Disallow: /feed
   Disallow: /comments
   Disallow: /category/*/*
   Disallow: */trackback
   Disallow: */feed
   Disallow: */comments
   Disallow: /*?*
   Disallow: /*?
   Disallow: */author/*

   2) it looks like your permalinks might be shagged it would be worth reseting them back to default, and then changing them back to /%category%/%postname%/ this should rewrite the settings in the htaccess file.

   3) Have you checked out yoast SEO plugin IMO way slicker than All in one hope this helps

   Cheers
   Nick

4. Chief Editor
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Thanks Nick - I added a robots.txt with text above with small changes Disallow: /category/*/* to Disallow: /story-category/*/* (I am using story-category as category base). Additionally I added
   

   Disallow: /wpstoryblog
   Disallow: /wpstoryblog/*
   Sitemap: http://yourstoryclub.com/sitemap.xml.gz

   to block my previous directory for wordpress that no more exist. I moved WP to root.
   Now waiting finger crossed... typically how much time google take to reflect changes in robots.txt

5. Vanguard Digital
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Hi Chief

   Really depends on the crawl rate of your site you should see it drop off little bit by little bit each day.

   Alternately in web master tools under diagnostics there is fetch as google bot where you can ask google to re index parts of your site, this will speed things up a little.

   Cheers
   Nick

6. Chief Editor
   Member
   Posted 5 months ago #

   Nick, thanks and Merry Christmas on behalf of yourstoryclub.com

   it works now. Duplicate meta description drastically reduced from 300 pages to 6 pages.

   Additionally, as you recommended, now I am using yoast SEO plugin. Hope it would get better.

   btw there is a feature in yoast SEO --> site map. That I disabled because I am using google xml sitemap. What do you suggest?

Reply

You must log in to post.