200 DUPLICATE META DESCRIPTION ERRORS ON THE SITE
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A duplicate meta description means two different pages have the same meta description. It isn’t really a problem, per se, but something that should be avoided when possible.
So, one place that duplicate descriptions will continue to exist is on a category page and when you click “older posts” on that category page. As you write new posts in categories, there will be some increase in duplicate meta descriptions, which again isn’t a problem per se.
For example, http://zuri.in/category/make-up-how-tos/eyes/ and http://zuri.in/category/make-up-how-tos/eyes/page/2/ will both have the description for the Eyes category. Since they’re both from the same category, it makes sense that they’ll have the same description. Google will alert you to this, basically, as a confirmation that you actually do have two pages that have the same descriptions.
If WordPress wasn’t involved and everything was hand-coded, you’d want to make sure the meta description tag in your page’s head was different than every other. With WordPress, the excerpt on pages and posts and the category/tag descriptions are used to generate this on most pages. Your site’s tagline (from Settings->General) is used on the home page and pages without a description set via the excerpt or the category/tag settings. The site’s tagline is also used on the date-based archives (e.g. the pages like http://zuri.in/2013/10/28 , http://zuri.in/2013/10/ , http://zuri.in/2013/ ,etc) and will account for likely most of the duplicates once Google correctly indexes your site.
Google has reported that they don’t use the meta descriptions as part of their actual site indexing, but it is what they display under the URL when your page is displayed on Google as a search result. The duplicate listings won’t negatively impact if your site is listed or where it is listed, but only what is displayed when it is returned.
Adding an excerpt to each post and to each category and tag will greatly reduce the number of duplicate meta tags as well as helps your visitors who find you via search results know what they’re about to see on your site.
While the issues may not be directly connected, if Google isn’t indexing your site as well as we would expect, there will be a latency seen between when you’ve updated a post and when Google updates their figures. Their older information (with the old meta descriptions) are likely to see be operative and could account for why the number is increasing rather than anything else.
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Also realized that they could be increasing also because the highest occurrence of “duplicate meta tag” errors are in URLs such as:
/2013/10/15/nail-art-designs-step-by-step/
/2013/10/15/nail-art-designs-step-by-step/comment-page-1/i.e. a post url and a “/comment-page-1/” URL. There are 48 such “pairs” of errors being reported. This alone accounts for 96 errors (out of 247).
Can I turn off the comments page? or stop google from reporting this as an error?
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On your Settings->Discussion page ( https://planetzuri.wordpress.com/wp-admin/options-discussion.php ) you can uncheck the option to “Break comments into pages of X top level comments per page…”
If anyone does visit a /comment-page-1/, it’ll take them to the actual post instead (e.g. /nail-art-designs-step-by-step in your example).
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Hi,
Hope you are doing well.3 questions:
1. Any update on why google isn’t crawling http://zuri.in? Please let me know.
2. Any update on why increasing number of duplicate title tags and meta descriptions appear on http://zuri.in?
3. Is there a way to “switch off” the “/comment-page-1/” page being created and therefore being crawled by google? I have done what you suggested (that is, “uncheck the option to Break comments into pages of X top level comments per page…”) – however, this redirects the user to the post – an ideal solution would be to not have this page created at all, so that the errors on GWT could disappear.
Thank you for your continued support. Eagerly awaiting resolution of these issues. Thank you.
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Hi again,
- We’re still investigating. We’re not blocking the Googlebot; we are in contact with folks at Google in their search division to determine the cause and resolve it.
- This is case-by-case and hard to say without seeing what new notifications are being reported to you. With the comment page example, each time the first comment was left on a post, it could generate a new coupling. With a new post, the date-based archive pages would be created that could trigger them. As discussed before, this is less of an actual issue as much as it is simply a notification to make you aware.
- Redirection to the post is ideal. If not, Google would report 404 errors to you, increasing your error count. The type of redirection employed informs Google that the content at /comment-page-1/ is permanently reachable at the post page and Google will clear them from their index. Since the crawling is still an issue, it will take until Google indexes the changes for GWT to update that listing. For all future posts or current ones that haven’t had a comment yet (thus ones that will receive their first comment after you’ve made the change), there will never be a comment-page-1 for Google to index. In short, it will resolve the duplicates due to the comment page on their own. Even when Google is indexing a site correctly, Google determines at what interval to scan a site, sometimes allowing weeks between scans. They have a ton of sites to scan and they try to be efficient when doing it!
Thanks for your patience. I’ll pass along an update as soon as I have one.
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1. Being patient. I hope wordpress finds a solution :)
2. From whatever little I understand, “duplicate title tags” is definitely an issue and negatively impacts search rankings. Google hates duplicate content.
3. Why can’t I remove URLs that I don’t want to exist or don’t want google to scan? I have a bunch of junk URLs that I never created. It wouldn’t be a problem if they “merely existed”, but its a definitely problem if google reports it to you as an “Error” on your site. With google being the primary way people find content, its definitely a problem. For example:
/?archives-list=1
/?pages-list
Are two URLs where google shows duplicate title error.Likewise for:
/2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-14/
/2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-28/
/2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-29/
/2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-36/
/2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-37/
Why these 4 URLs show “duplicate title tag” error, out of all the images on my blog is beyond me?See, I would just like the blog to be error-free. None of us really know how google ranks. I mean truly, no one can say for sure. All we hope is that google is consistent with the way they index the site with the “webmaster tools” they provide for one to check for areas to “correct or improve”, as highlighted by google herself :) Both you and I cannot say how much http://zuri.in is being penalized for the errors that are there on the site – but sure as heck I would LOVE for there to be ZERO errors. Why don’t we try to simply find a way to kill the errors ? E.g. why can’t I “BLOCK” or “REMOVE” the urls /comment-page-1/ from sitemap or use the option that Google provides to Remove URLs — This is copied-pasted from GWT “Remove URLs: Use robots.txt to specify how search engines should crawl your site, or request removal of URLs from Google’s search results ( have you read our removal requirements? ). Only site owners and users with full permissions can request removals.”. Now you guys have full permission to my site – why can’t we remove URLs that are deleted from robots.txt (whatever that is!) rather than me creating purely fictitious content after having deleted the URL (for good reason). There HAS to be a better way!
Can you please pass my request to your developer team to see if they can work with GWT so that wordpress.com hosted blogs can have ZERO errors? it will make regular folks feel much better and I am sure rankings of “good content” will soar.
I do understand when you are trying to tell me that duplicate titles or duplicate meta-descriptions or crawl / 404 errors on non-existent URLs are not important for rankings, but we don’t know for sure. Do we? Google’s algorithm is a secret. All we have is the webmaster tools. So lets use that bring the errors down to ZERO.
Alternatively, I am even ok if you recommend a more dramatic solution, like moving to wordpress.org to control these specific things. But I would sure like some advice on how to sort the GWT errors even after the crawl error has been looked after.
I apologize for rambling a bit here, but I just hope that you understand my pain. :)
By the way, your understatement of the decade made me smile: “They have a ton of sites to scan” – no shit! :) :)
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- Thanks :-) Trust me, we want this resolve as quickly as possible too!
- The title, in and of itself, isn’t duplicate content. The actual text of the page itself is the consideration with duplicate content.
- For both /?archives-list=1 and /?pages-list , I’m not sure without deeper investigation why Google would index those. They both still display the normal home page with the canonical URL set correctly. Since those are both URL query strings, you can add them to a list within GWT to the URL Parameters list within the Crawl section.
For those image pages, it appears Google has added them after finding links to those pages somewhere else (since the image pages are not included in the sitemap). Google is reporting them as duplicate titles since they, well, do have duplicate titles. See the screenshot from your media library: https://cloudup.com/cuHeEhvXuEI . Since they are all titled the same, the attachment pages (e.g. the /2013/10/14/30-stunning-mehandi-designs-for-indian-brides/960×649-14/ ) will have the same titles. I noticed on some of your other images, you included a number (e.g. title of photo 1, title of photo 2) which is more “Google friendly”. (Note: the “Caption” field with images for your theme is what generates the meta description, so the captions and titles should be unique to avoid errors).
The /comment-page-1/ was not included in the sitemap and isn’t now. Google picked up on it naturally and it’ll fall out of their index naturally as well, as it is no longer present.
Looking closer at Google Webmaster Tools, you can request removal of the now deleted pages via the Remove URLs option in the Google Index menu. The last time I looked that closely at GWT, that wasn’t an option so my apologies for not being up to date with Google’s offering. The message from GWT for removing URLs meant users with full permission to your Google Webmaster Tools account.
In general though, WordPress.com has good relations with the folks at Google and are up with their best practices. The crawling issue, or lack of crawling, is very serious to us. We’re waiting to hear more from Google about what led to the downshift in crawls and have folks all over the company ready to dive in once we have that info.
Switching to .org could be a solution, though there are cons to that as well. I think we can reasonably resolve at least the bulk of the issues.
They might even be up to two tons of sites in their index now ;-).
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2. I understand. Well, lets hope solution to #1 helps reduce duplicate title and meta desc tag errors.
3.. while we are waiting for answers to 1, maybe you can help me with some questions:
– you say “there are cons to that as well.” – I have read the wordpress support page on .com vs .org and shifting from .com to .org . What would you say are going to the biggest cons?
– am I correct in assuming that shifting from .com to .org may help with search rankings – because I could be using “breadcrumb navigation” (I read somewhere the google likes sites with this style of navigation), “seo plugins like yoast” and may be some others that I am not aware of right now. But my question is (maybe a controversial question) – is SEO a reasonably motivation to shift from .com to .org? If not, why? and in your view, why do people who decide to move – do so?
– what the hell is a “meta keywords tag” and where do I find it on my theme (Chateau)? :) why is the “meta-keywords” on my pags absent/empty?Thanks a ton! :)
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I’m not convinced that’s there is a definitive SEO difference between .com and .org (as someone who works for .com but have built/managed .org sites for years prior).
The cons are more along the line of finding a solid host that won’t experience downtime or slow down (as Google dislikes slow loading pages as well) and having to troubleshoot issues yourself—site gets hacked from not keeping WordPress up to date or using an insecure theme or plugin. While you have more control of the fine points of your site, you have a greater responsibility to the rest of the mess of running a website. If you’re okay with that, then it comes down to a personal choice and your long-term plan for your site (looking to do e-commerce or accepting paid ads or sponsored posts, etc).
In short, there are aspects that can gain you additional control over SEO (for better or worse, if setup wrong). If it is worth the time and money to you relative to the *possible* gain, then may be worth further investigation.
Regarding meta keywords, they are an old method in HTML to, basically, add “categories” to your pages. They were super easy to abusive so they’re practically abandoned. Google admitted in 2009 that they haven’t used them in rankings for years: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html
Since they’re of little value to the major search engines, we don’t support them or provide an option to add them on WordPress.com.
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Update:
The crawl stats have fallen further :(
:,(
The latest datapoint is as of 10/28/13
My suspicion – it is definitely linked to “Gallery” creation on my posts. I published this silly page 3 days ago (mostly to test my theory, but it was a surprise that it received TONS of views!) : http://zuri.in/simple-mehandi-designs-for-hands/
Nothing but a big gallery of images. Is it possible that this is contributing to crawl errors?Note that when I removed all the “Gallery” stuff from my blog AND reduced size of images on some key pages, the stats went up a little bit.
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Google has put their “crawling engineering team” on the case and they don’t believe it has anything to do with the content of the site itself. Google and our systems team are working together. I don’t want to pass along the speculation of the cause without confirmation that it is the issue, but the Gallery, in and of itself, doesn’t appear to be a cause.
I’ll let you know when we have an update.
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ok. Good to know (wiping sweat off my brow with relief)
:)
Will wait for an update.
Cheers!!
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Do I need to worry about images not being compressed on my site?
For example: I tried to check the speed of some pages (say the main page) using http://tools.pingdom.com/fpt/ — when I type “zuri.in” pingdom says “Oops…something went wrong”.
So I try the same test on http://www.webpagetest.org/ — this says the pagespeed is ok, but image compression is extremely poor (gives the site an “F” grade – whatever that means :)).
But perhaps, this might be a problem if google tries to crawl individual “image” permalinks – and those images just may be large for googlebot or take time to load, and the googlebot timesout or aborts.The compression issue is specifically highlighted for the following images (Sidenote: I am just trying to help — don’t mean to bother you so much — and as always, you have my utmost respect for trying to be so helpful and prompt. You have no idea how much of a relief it is to know that someone at wordpress is looking into this. Thank you for that.)
FAILED – (134.0 KB, compressed = 29.8 KB – savings of 104.1 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/bridal-mehndi-designs-for-hands-8.jpg?w=317&h=361
FAILED – (83.6 KB, compressed = 30.9 KB – savings of 52.7 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/vushv.jpg?w=295&h=538
FAILED – (74.2 KB, compressed = 39.8 KB – savings of 34.4 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/manish-malhotra-2.jpg?w=297&h=409
FAILED – (47.1 KB, compressed = 17.8 KB – savings of 29.3 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/74.jpg?w=317&h=366
FAILED – (40.4 KB, compressed = 13.8 KB – savings of 26.6 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3303.jpg?w=370&h=246
FAILED – (46.5 KB, compressed = 22.6 KB – savings of 23.8 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/3236c6072981353fcefcf6bd68cac97c.jpg?w=226&h=346
FAILED – (43.5 KB, compressed = 23.6 KB – savings of 19.8 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/131.jpg?w=317&h=317
FAILED – (27.1 KB, compressed = 9.2 KB – savings of 17.9 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/dsc_3292.jpg?w=317&h=211
FAILED – (43.1 KB, compressed = 26.7 KB – savings of 16.4 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/best-smudge-proof-kajal-png.jpg?w=423&h=338
FAILED – (33.2 KB, compressed = 18.0 KB – savings of 15.2 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/94.jpg?w=423&h=241
FAILED – (36.5 KB, compressed = 22.3 KB – savings of 14.3 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/39562e3914d549139d5bb406158d278a.jpg?w=300&h=450
FAILED – (27.7 KB, compressed = 13.8 KB – savings of 14.0 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/116.jpg?w=320&h=256
FAILED – (28.6 KB, compressed = 17.1 KB – savings of 11.5 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/115.jpg?w=529&h=151
FAILED – (27.9 KB, compressed = 17.1 KB – savings of 10.8 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/91.jpg?w=222&h=333
FAILED – (23.7 KB, compressed = 15.4 KB – savings of 8.3 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/photo-2.jpg?w=317&h=249
FAILED – (6.5 KB, compressed = 4.0 KB – savings of 2.4 KB) – http://planetzuri.files.wordpress.com/2013/01/l05-3t.jpg?w=192&h=192
FAILED – (2.9 KB, compressed = 1.7 KB – savings of 1.1 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/1115893_100004699265415_730261360_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.9 KB, compressed = 1.8 KB – savings of 1.1 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash1/372770_100003100908888_1226439051_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.9 KB, compressed = 1.8 KB – savings of 1.1 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash3/260876_100000141607243_718727687_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.7 KB, compressed = 1.6 KB – savings of 1.0 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash1/371090_100001800054360_1282827960_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.6 KB, compressed = 1.6 KB – savings of 1.0 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash1/211589_1092635699_735215171_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.5 KB, compressed = 1.5 KB – savings of 0.9 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn2/1115910_100003179274269_1205533104_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.4 KB, compressed = 1.5 KB – savings of 0.9 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash1/1075909_394412683964007_1183701815_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.4 KB, compressed = 1.5 KB – savings of 0.9 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn2/1118715_100003200785452_1057893547_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.4 KB, compressed = 1.5 KB – savings of 0.9 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn1/211326_100002926446154_1073223170_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.3 KB, compressed = 1.4 KB – savings of 0.8 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash1/369187_100003801777828_1183853197_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.3 KB, compressed = 1.5 KB – savings of 0.8 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/1119397_100005073572997_110864719_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.1 KB, compressed = 1.3 KB – savings of 0.8 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-ash2/1076679_100005070460607_1849764813_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.0 KB, compressed = 1.3 KB – savings of 0.7 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn2/1117508_100006440017472_1345375700_q.jpg
FAILED – (2.1 KB, compressed = 1.4 KB – savings of 0.7 KB) – http://profile.ak.fbcdn.net/hprofile-ak-prn2/1115808_100001278406782_1351936977_q.jpg
FAILED – (0.0 KB, compressed = 0.0 KB – savings of 0.0 KB) – http://s2.wp.com/i/favicon.ico?m=1311975824g -
Sorry – here is the full link: http://www.webpagetest.org/result/131030_ZN_PHA/1/performance_optimization/#compress_images
This has a lot of info about the page (e.g. it says use of “CDN” is failed and a long list of uncompressed images :))
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Regarding the CDN, the webpagetest.org site is partly at fault there. Any image at planetzuri.files.wordpress.com is in our CDN. (A CDN is a content distribution network. The idea is static assets (e.g. things that never change) should be duplicated on a number of different servers in diverse geographical locations to reduce load time and the number of connections hitting it at once).
All files uploaded to WordPress.com are duplicated on servers at each of our datacenters and we transparently direct traffic to the datacenter closest to the visitor’s location, as best as we can determine it. In short, a lot of the indicators in the results that a CDN isn’t used is rather that webpagetest.org doesn’t realize that *.files.wordpress.com is actually a private CDN. :-)
Regarding the image compression, we already do compress uploaded images some. We’re looking at using a different process that would further improve how much they’re compressed. Always something to improve upon!
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Hello there! Hope you are doing well. Understood about the CDN issue (or non-issue). Thanks for clarifying. Your explanations are always thorough and very well written.
A quick question: Would you advice that I swtich my theme? I am considering switching to the “Expound” theme (http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/expound/) or “Traveler” (http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/traveler/)
Still making up my mind about which one. I love both.
However, I wanted to check with you if it is advisable to switch during these “turbulent” times, so should I stay put until the crawl issue is resolved?
Moreover, would you think (as an experiment) should I switch my theme just to see if it impacts the crawl issue in any way whatsoever? Maybe it helps improve or exacerbate the problem, either way – we may get more clues about what is causing this problem.
Would love your candid advice on this matter?
Also, my customary daily question – Please let me know if there are any updates on the crawl issue? :) :)
Thank you again, and I look forward to hearing from you.
Cheers!!
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Howdy again!
From my understanding of where we stand with Google, I don’t *think* changing themes would have an impact, but that said, Google hasn’t provided us for the root cause. With changing themes, the URLs are still the same so changing themes shouldn’t impact basic crawl numbers, assuming both themes link to a similar amount of content on the home page, sidebar, etc.
My thought: If you want to change your theme (ignoring the crawl issue), go for it. :-) If you’re wanting to change just because of the crawling issue, I wouldn’t. I know Expound better and confirmed it works the same way as Chateau for meta descriptions!
They did respond that they are manually increasing the “crawl rate” for sites hosted on WordPress.com (over doubling the number of pages per second they crawl), so hopefully you’ll see some increase reflected on Google Webmaster Tools.
In short, some progress. Hope you’re having a great day!
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Thank you for your thoughts.
>>I know Expound better and confirmed it works the same way as Chateau for meta descriptions!
What about “Traveler” (http://theme.wordpress.com/themes/traveler/)? Does it do things differently under the hood when it comes to meta descriptions? :)
>> In short, some progress.
Thank you. My crawl stats did nudge up a little bit on GWT. But no change on HTML errors. Still 221 pages with duplicate meta descriptions and 110 pages with duplicate title tags. Any update on this issue?Cheers!!
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>>Traveler
I checked it out this morning and it acts the same way as the other two. I wanted to be sure with my own two eyes before telling you :-)
>> Crawling
Glad to hear the increase. Have you made any additional changes to your site? I noticed that the titles on these images were still the same ( https://cloudup.com/cGPWgTHXNyF ). Those may account for a large number of the duplicate title tags an duplicate meta. I did update some of the meta descriptions for those images.Could you take a screenshot or copy/paste the list of errors. We can go through them to determine which ones are fixed, but not yet updated by Google, which ones aren’t resolvable (e.g. date-based archive meta descriptions), and which ones could be resolved with a change on your site.
Thanks!
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>>About checking Traveler
Thank you! Really appreciate the help.>>Crawling increase.
Made no major changes. Just on some of the ‘image heavy’ posts I decreased the size of images dramatically. Lets wait for 1 or 2 days to see the “upward trend” before we can feel relieved that its resolved.>>I did update some of the meta descriptions
Wow. Thank you so much! I will update the titles to make them unique.I love your idea of going through the errors to bucket them in 3 categories:
1. fixed, but not yet updated by Google
2. aren’t resolvable (e.g. date-based archive meta descriptions)
3. could be resolved with a change on http://zuri.inHere are the ALL the duplicate meta descriptions and duplicate title tags as screenshot and CSV: https://www.dropbox.com/s/fv41nxx4uye0m87/GWT%20errors%20zuri-in.zip
Please let me know if there is an issue accessing the zip file.Whatever falls in #3, just let me know, and I will get working on it ASAP :)
Cheers!!
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