Duplicate titles can cause issues and affect your site’s overall SEO. If this is a concern of yours and you are using the very popular CMS, WordPress, you can keep duplicate titles at bay. This will keep your URL slug from having a number at the end, which isn’t good for SEO, either. Here’s how you can deal with duplicate post titles in WordPress.
What Happens with a Duplicate Title in WordPress?
When you create a post in WordPress, it will be assigned a URL slug. This is usually the title of the post.
However, when the title is the same as a post you have already created; it will get a number assigned to the end of it. This is not a good thing for SEO and it’s still a duplicate title.
Both the titles of these blog posts are the same, which can confuse the search engines. They may rank one page instead of the other, which can cause issues.
How to Avoid Duplicate Titles in WordPress Posts
You can manually remove the number at the end of any post that gets assigned a number and change the title. This is an easy way to deal with duplicate titles on a single author WordPress website. However, this becomes more difficult the larger your site gets and if you have more than one author.
Using the Duplicate Title Validation Plugin for WordPress
The plugin to help you with this task is the Duplicate Title Validation Plugin for WordPress. Download, install and activate this plugin before you go any further.
Once you’ve done this, you can go to Posts>>Add New and the plugin will work for you. If you add a title that is the same as one of your current posts, it will tell you.
Not only will this plugin tell you there is a duplicate title, but it will also keep you from being able to publish the post. The title will have to be changed before it can be published. If you try to publish the post, it will display a message in red and save it as a draft.
This plugin will help you to keep duplicate titles from happening and protect your site’s overall SEO. If you have more than one author or you plan on posting quite often, use this plugin to ensure you don’t end up with any duplicate titles.
