How to Eliminate The Duplicate Contents In Blogger

There is no doubt that Blogger is the Google's most popular and reliable product where people share their knowledge and interest to the world for free of any cost. At the same time, the major back draw in Blogger is that it creates the duplicate meta title and meta description which can be found in search console. This is a common problem which occurs due to some custom templates that you install to your Blogger blogs. Basically, Google indexes the three different URLs which points to the same content.

The desktop version of URL .html redirects to mobile version URLs like ?m=0 and ?m=1 and thus Google fails to decide which URL should it exactly index. As I earlier mentioned, duplicate meta title and meta description are very common in badly coded templates. Don't panic, here I will show you two different working ways by which you can eliminate the duplicate titles and description in Search Console. First, we will discuss Rel Canonical and later robots.txt file.

Why Should You Remove Duplicate Meta Title and Description

Since search engines changed their algorithm completely, it becomes necessary to care for your Website ranking. Duplicate contents will not only harm your site ranking but will also penalize your website for duplicate contents and the chances are search engines like Google could ban your website. Google always tries to deliver the quality and unique search results to a search term. So, Google hates badly when it finds the duplicate contents over and over.

1. Removing Duplicate Meta Title and Meta Description Using Rel Canonical

Implementing the canonical link is the best and the safest way to which you can ask the Google that both desktop and mobile version URLs are same that points to itself. Before you add rel canonical link to your blogger theme, let's check does it existed or not. Because adding the Canonical link multiple times may cause more duplicate contents in search console.

Adding Rel Canonical Link to Blogger

Go to your Blogger homepage
Right-click anywhere on a blank area and select View Source Code
Press Ctrl + F to open the search box
Type the given code in the search box and check does rel canonical is existed or not.

For Custom Domain: <link href='http://www.knigulper.com/' rel='canonical'/>
For Default Blogspot URL: <link href='http://knigulper.blogspot.com/' rel='canonical'/>

Note: Replace the blue text with your own URL while searching it in your template.

If you've finds it multiple times, then keep only one and remove the others. However, if you didn't find the rel canonical link, then its the time to add this to your blogger template by following the given steps.

Go to your Blogger Dashboard > Theme > Edit HTML
Click anywhere inside the Template/Theme Editor > Press Ctrl + F > Type <head> and paste the given code right below the <head> section

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Click Save Theme

Now repeat the first 1-4 steps to check whether you added the rel canonical link successfully or not.

If you have found it then nothing to worry about. However, if you still couldn't find it then copy the below-mentioned code and paste it just after the <head> section

<link expr:href='data:blog.url' rel='canonical'/>

2. Removing Duplicate Meta Title and Meta Description Using robots.txt File

This is the final way by which you can ask the Google to ignore the mobile version URLs like ?m=0 and ?m=1

Go to your Blogger Dashboard > Settings > Search Preferences > Custom robots.txt
Click Edit > Click Yes
Paste the Custom robots.txt in the text field (Note: Delete old robots.txt if you have previously added)

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?m=0
Disallow: /*?m=1
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google
Disallow:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Allow: /
Sitemap: http://www.knigulper.com/sitemap.xml

Finally, click Save button

Note: Replace the http://www.knigulper.com/ with your own URL

How to Inform Google About Your New robots.txt File

Login to your Search Console account
Select your Website
Select Crawl > robots.txt Tester
Delete your old robots.txt code and paste the new one that you have added in your Blogger
After you paste the new robots.txt code, click Submit button to let Google know about your new robots.txt file

Note your current duplicate meta titles and meta description to ensure your new changes. Sit back and wait for 3-7 days.