coreyweb

Eliminate duplicate titles in WordPress category and tag list pages

Thanks to Google Webmaster Tools, I discovered that WordPress was generating duplicate titles for my Category and Tag list pages. Not good.

Say you have a Category named “Videos”. The Category list page shows 10 posts in that category, with “previous” and “next” links to see 10 more.

Like this:

• 1st Category page: http://www.notreble.com/videos
• 2nd Category page: http://www.notreble.com/videos/page/2
• 3rd Category page: http://www.notreble.com/videos/page/3

and so on…

The problem:

WordPress generates the exact same title for each page:

<title>Videos</title>

What it should be doing instead:

• 1st:

  <title>Videos</title>

• 2nd:

  <title>Videos - Page 2</title>

• 3rd:

  <title>Videos - Page 3</title>

and so on…

The fix:

Insert this in your title tag (header.php) of your WordPress theme, and you should be good to go:

<?php
  if ($paged > 1) { // if the page is the category index, skip the rule
      echo(' - Page '); // the prefix for the page number
      echo($paged); // the page number
  }
?>