Duplicate Titles with Yoast WordPress SEO

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See site title “Likoma Playground” duplicate added at end of title

When using Yoast’s fantastic WordPress SEO, depending on your theme, you might get duplicate titles. If you do, there’s a simple fix.

We’re using a WOO theme and the title gets duplicated and put at the end of the site title.

Check this box, “Force rewrite titles.”

In the settings for the WordPress SEO General tab, choose Force Rewrite Titles. It seems there’s a conflict where the theme wants to use your site title in one way and WordPress SEO wants to do it another way. By checking the “Force rewrite titles” box, you solve the duplicate title issue.

The WordPress SEO plugin is a powerful SEO plugin that has loads of features to help you drive traffic to your site by optimizing the titles and descriptions of your posts and pages.

Yoast leads the field in SEO and his plugin is easy to use and highly recommended for any website that cares about its traffic.

If your titles are duplicated, try this fix and hopefully you’re all set.

Duplicate title now removed. Only title and description now.

Bradley Charbonneau2017-05-25T22:54:33+02:00

About the Author: Bradley Charbonneau

I've done the big corporate thing. I've done the creative writer thing. Now I'm happily in the middle. I like to help small businesses who are interested in "working their website before their website works them." I'm also interested in creating beautiful sites with powerful WordPress themes. Google+

30 Comments

Pete June 8, 2013 at 8:22 am

Hello,

I’m using yoast and magazine page for my homepage, it is static page. But then, I got duplicate titles for /page2/, /page3/, … Force rewrite titles above doesn’t work. Do you have any suggestions?

Btw, How to make a homepage like yours?

Thanks before.
- Bradley Charbonneau June 12, 2013 at 7:51 pm
  
  Hey Pete,
  
  Thanks for stopping by. In a word, I don’t know the answer, but hopefully can help figure out a solution. Have you tried the WOO forums or help? Or the Yoast SEO help?
  
  I looked around in the options for all kinds of different page types and custom post types and all that, but don’t see anything that seems relevant. In the end, it’s just a page, but maybe because it’s a custom page template that it doesn’t work.
  
  Lemme know!
  - Pete June 21, 2013 at 2:05 am
    
    Hi, I’m back
    Finally I got the answer, now I’m using yoast development version. It will work when you use static page. This is just an information.
    
    Regards.
    - Bradley Charbonneau June 21, 2013 at 11:23 am
      
      Thanks, Pete. Does the development version mean the “beta” version? So that it will be fixed in an upcoming version of Yoast SEO? Thanks!
- Bradley Charbonneau July 5, 2013 at 11:51 pm
  
  Hi Pete,
  I also saw a note in the latest WOO Canvas Changelog with regards to something about the Magazine layout. Maybe that helped, too.
Vinícius Santana June 15, 2013 at 6:30 pm

It works, thanks a lot!
- Bradley Charbonneau June 17, 2013 at 3:48 am
  
  Great to hear it, Vinicius!
Terry Briegel June 19, 2013 at 11:56 am

I have forced the re-write of titles & deleted the %%sitename%%
But it did not do anything
I have read that you might need to clear cache for it to show up, not sure where or how?
any ideas
thx
T
- Bradley Charbonneau June 21, 2013 at 11:25 am
  
  Yes, clear your cache, but also you might head over to /wp-admin/options-permalink.php in your site and just save–you don’t need to change anything, but just going to that page in your WP admin and saving helps create or refresh the permalink structure. Hope that helps.
Glenn June 26, 2013 at 11:31 am

Bradley – thanks much for the fix ! One more question: Before I checked this box, a sample title was reading: “Printing saves lives! | Teamflexo BlogTeamflexo Blog”. After I put in the fix the title read: “Printing saves lives! – Teamflexo Blog”. So it got rid of the duplication but substituted a “-” for a “|”. Is there anyway to get the “|” back ?

Thanks !
- Bradley Charbonneau June 27, 2013 at 12:37 am
  
  Aha, Glenn, I see what you mean. I prefer the “pipe” also over the “dash.” Here’s my low-tech fix (since I just searched and couldn’t figure out the high-tech fix).
  
  In Yoast SEO settings, go to Titles & Metas, then Post Types and under each type of posts (Posts, Pages, Media, you’ll see something like this:
  
  %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
  
  I took a guess and figured that “sep” is the separator. If I could figure out where to change what “sep” is, I’d do that (the high-tech solution), but couldn’t figure that out. So here’s my low-tech solution:
  
  %%title%% %%page%% | %%sitename%%
  
  I removed the “%%sep%%” and replaced it with the pipe. Seems to work … if you (or anyone) has a better fix, happy to hear it.
  - Glenn July 6, 2013 at 5:41 am
    
    Bradley — Well that fix is certainly better than the one I had (hand editing) ! Thanks much!
Anonymous July 3, 2013 at 12:33 pm

[…] […]
steven July 31, 2013 at 1:20 pm

worked perfectly for me! thanks!
- Bradley Charbonneau August 1, 2013 at 6:15 pm
  
  Great to hear it, Steven!
Lê Tuy?n September 28, 2013 at 11:35 am

Stick in Titles & Metas- Force rewrite titles

WordPress SEO has auto-detected whether it needs to force rewrite the titles for your pages, if you think it’s wrong and you know what you’re doing, you can change the setting here.

ok ok.
alby111 October 1, 2013 at 9:24 am

I´m using Canvas with magazine , last version with Multilanguage , and when I put info in the english home version and add the title for the SEO, then the system generates a home-2, and the browser can´t find the english home anymore, and the url adds http://mysite/en/home-2 into the url
anybody had something like this happend?
- alby111 October 1, 2013 at 12:18 pm
  
  I changed to the new version of WPML and now the problem is gone, thanks a lot anyway for your post , regards
  - Bradley Charbonneau October 1, 2013 at 10:04 pm
    
    Whew! Glad to hear it, alby! Thanks for posting your updated fix, too.
John Romaine October 22, 2013 at 1:15 am

Y’know, this one gets me every time!
- Bradley Charbonneau December 16, 2013 at 1:42 pm
  
  Hopefully it’ll be fixed in an upcoming release!
aries December 15, 2013 at 4:47 pm

Yes..,
Now, I can setup wordpress SEO with this tutorial.
thanks a lot Bradley.
- Bradley Charbonneau December 16, 2013 at 1:42 pm
  
  You’re welcome, Aries!
Graziella May 23, 2014 at 10:33 am

After many hours searching for a solution in internet, I found you, and your solution works! Thanks!
- Bradley Charbonneau May 24, 2014 at 9:46 am
  
  Glad to hear it, Graziella!
John June 19, 2014 at 11:23 am

Yoast is starting to piss me off.

I have 23 sites using All in One SEO, and 2 using Yoast SEO.

Google only re-writes my homepage titles and a few post titles when using yoast.

This is proof to me that its not on google end entirely but something the yoast plugin is or isnt doing./
John June 15, 2015 at 1:28 am

Thanks Bradley
it was really helpful
I hope it works
David October 30, 2017 at 4:18 pm

Everywhere else people were saying to keep that ‘disabled’ . I had to alter code. That never worked. You are the only 1 I found that said to enable and it worked a treat. Thanks a bunch!
matlabi December 17, 2017 at 2:45 pm

Thanks Bradley
it was really helpful
I hope it works
Michael March 2, 2018 at 11:13 am

I do not see this option in the plugin anywhere, was this removed in the latest version?