Duplicate meta descriptions in Google Search Console despite redirection

Question

In Search Console > HTML improvements > Duplicate meta descriptions I have errors of pages that I have a redirection in the .htaccess. I mean the Search Console see as duplicate the old page that does not exists anymore and the new page that substitutes it.

As I said, I redirected the old page to the new one in the .htaccess. I have the .htaccess in the root of the site. I have checked that the redirection works well. I have checked that there is no link in my site that points to the old page. Is there anything else I should do?

I improved the title of the page, the URL and, at the same time, made the redirection in January 2017. Now is May 30, 2017. I know that the Search Console needs time but, isn't that too much?

Answer 1

I have checked that the redirection works well. I have checked that there is no link in my site that points to the old page. Is there anything else I should do?

Yes. Check again. If you have an advanced setup like myself, you can use a command line tool like curl to check a webpage and see if it returns correct data. A page with malformed headers and/or data can confuse google.

Visit this site: https://redbot.org/

Then enter a URL that is supposed to redirect to another URL. When you hit submit, you'll see the headers that are returned.

If you see the following lines:

HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Location: http://example.com/new

and the Location line is somewhere in the headers and "http://example.com/new" is replaced with the actual URL of your page, then you're on the right track.

Now put in the new URL and hit submit and you should see the following line at the top of the headers:

HTTP/1.1 200 OK

The only variances in the HTTP/1.1 protocol allowed is that the OK after 200 can be changed to something different, and same goes with "Moved permanently".

HTTP/2.0 might produce different results but the idea is the same. One page returns headers that instruct a browser to redirect automatically, and another page returns headers that instruct a browser that there is content on the page to display to the guest.

Just for sanity purposes, I'd recommend using apache's built-in redirection pages since the title tag of that page is different from what you would use for your pages.

Answer 2

Normally it doesn't take that long to see changes.. but sometimes it can be very slow.

1. Try to fetch and render (Google Search Console) the original page url to see if Google can see the redirect you have created and/or if other helpful messages appear.
2. Then choose to index the page.

That will usually do the trick.