Help with duplicate issue in WP

[ArtphotoasiA]

Hello there.... in my photography blog I just changed my permalink in WP to a more structured solution that better cover and describe the variety of pictures and images displayed.

So i moved from...

mysite.net/blog/yangon-photos/

to...

mysite.net/blog/photography/southeast-asia/myanmar-2011/yangon-photos/


I use Platinum SEO pack plugin in WP and I have everything re-directly 301 smoothly to the new url.

If I digit the old url in the browser I got the new one and the correct page.

Also the canonical link is created correctly and is the new one.

All look perfect but... Google webmaster tool is finding out hundreds of duplicate content considering wrongly the old url and the new url as different pages (and so obviously same title and description).

What I should do?

[shakir]

Can't you manage it by robot.txt and sitemap?. I think its the best option and give some time to Google

[ArtphotoasiA]

Sure I managed with a sitemap and also robot......... I think have to wait a little....

[murphypj]

Hi,

I've no experience with WP, or with the type of changes you have made. But from my own experience, and from conversations I've had here on other issues, there seems to be acceptance by several people that Google Webmaster Tools is in some stage of meltdown.

I have always accepted that GWT have been slow to pick up on changes, but on my current SEO project, I've been getting some weird and scary messages, some indicating that G was unable to locate my robots.txt file, others that some of the pages were unreachable.

It is at the stage where on the GWT 'Sitemaps' page, the robots.txt is found with a '202' message, but using the "Search as Googlebot" option, there were warnings to the effect that Robots.txt could not be found.

The responses I received to my post reassured me to a large extent that the information on GWT was pretty unreliable. Most of the errors/warnings on the current project are now resolved ( at least for now ).

On my own site, I have found that GWT gives some valuable information in the various sections, and I have been pointed to errors or oversights I have made. But, having made the changes to correct these, it has taken up to 9 months for my changes to be reflected in the relevant GWT section.

In particular, duplicate Titles and Descriptions, which have been highlighted, and then fixed, have taken several months to disappear from the GWT warnings.

So, while I cannot say everything is fine, and ignore the warnings, if your new pages are being picked up in organic search, and from external links, and your traffic and conversions are not being affected, it may be that you just need to monitor the GWT messages over a longer period of time before they reflect what the current situation actually is. Hope everything works out for you.

PJ

[ArtphotoasiA]

Thank you so much for your deep analysis and reply.

I will not care much of this issue... I mean I will be going on correcting mistakes if mistakes are real, and also correcting if some "old ghost" pages are still picked up by Google using robot.txt and rediret 301.
Beside this I also noted in the past several months before errors will be gone.

I do really hope this mess will not effect pagerank.

I can tell also that another website I manage for a customer have no GWT installed and no sitemap at all and have a nice huge traffic organic from Google.... just because the rich content of the website is at the end the most important factor ABOVE ALL.

[ArtphotoasiA]

Ok guys can confirm.... it was just matter of time.... today there are no errors anymore.

Regarding this issue and experiment I just want let you know that today there is not anymore any issue with duplicate content in my website but the pagerank of all the changed url post in WP is now 0 (before was 2) like if it was a brand new page with new url.
That was really bad! and Google states exactly the opposite saying that a correct 301 redirection does not alter the old pagerank.

[bhartzer]

Ok guys can confirm.... it was just matter of time.... today there are no errors anymore

Glad to hear. If you set up your 301 redirects properly, it will just take time for Google to straighten it all out.

You need to re-create the sitemap for your modified website.

Your plugin(s) should take care of that automatically, since the sitemap is usually automatically created via the wordpress database.