Duplicate meta descriptions and title tags in Google

Hi,

When I use Google Webmaster Tools to diagnose my website,
there are a lot of duplicate Meta description and Title Tags in
the HTML suggestions as follows,
Meta description Pages
Duplicate meta descriptions 280

Title tag Pages
Duplicate title tags 4,452

After checking the reasons, I find the duplicated meta descriptions
is caused by many same category page displaying.
The trouble for duplicate tittle tags is the differenct entries of one
item, for example, one from the entry of the item itself and the other
from the entry of the manufacturer.

Google Webmaster Tools automatically get info from a website and
treate differenct pages different even they are the same page but
trunct to display in many pages (for the purpose of a concise display
of course). We can say Google is not smart enough in this case (I sent
another message on Google Help Forum about it).

But is there a technique to overcome the duplicate troubles?

Thanks,

Simplest way is to give your categories etc canonical URL's

Hi JAY6390,

I'm using SEO URL's in my OC. Is it canonical or not?

JAY6390 wrote:Simplest way is to give your categories etc canonical URL's

Would you please explain more about it? Thanks,

Some pages can have more than one URL to them. For instance, when you select a product directly it is at the URL
yoursite.com/product-name
but when you find it via categories, it goes to
yoursite.com/category-name/product-name
They both have the exact same content, but have a different URL

What a canonical does is it defines the "official" url of the page, so you can let google figure out that it's the same page. OC has canonicals for products, but not for categories, search, manufacturers etc

Hi JAY6390,

JAY6390 wrote: They both have the exact same content, but have a different URL

You're right. That's the reason why Google say you have a duplicate descriptions or title tags.
As the different URLs refer to the same content of a product!

JAY6390 wrote: What a canonical does is it defines the "official" url of the page, so you can let google figure out that it's the same page. OC has canonicals for products, but not for categories, search, manufacturers etc

Do you mean there is no a better solution for OC to these troubles?
Thanks,

Canonical URLS are the way to prevent it. If your products are showing as duplicate, either you have an old version of opencart, or you have URLS that are cached from before you set up SEO urls, and google hasn't had a chance to clear out it's old urls for your site

Hi JAY6390,

I'm using the OC latest version v1.491.
So I have to find out how to let Google clear my cached previous URLs. Thanks,

There's no magical way I'm afraid, you just have to wait. It'll happen. Also, don't be too concerned with it, while it's duplicate, if your site still comes up in google then you've not been banned for it

Hi JAY6390,

I found the setting in Google Webmaster Tools which says,
'If your site uses URL parameters, some of the parameters may be unnecessary for page navigation. Asking Google to ignore these parameters can reduce duplicate content in Google's index and make the site more crawlable.' Do you think I can change the setting to avoid the troubles, besides waiting Google to clear
the cached next time? Thanks,

If your site is using SEO urls, then no, its pointless to be honest, since those parameters shouldn't show on the pages I mentioned

So shall we disable all the parameters which are mentioned in webmaster tools?