Avoiding Duplicate Titles in WordPress Media Attachments

Looking through Google Webmaster tools, I discovered a warning about duplicate title tags coming from WordPress media attachment pages, like this one.

Here is a quick fix (place inside the

of header.php: 
<?php if ( is_attachment() ) { ?>
  <meta name="robots" content="noindex, nofollow" />
<?php } ?>

You can also adjust your title tag, to include some sort of prefix, like this:

<title>
  <?php if ( is_attachment() ) { ?>Attachment: <?php } ?>
  <!-- include your normal title stuff here -->
</title>

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:

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
  }
?>