The fix, in one snippet
<title>{{ category }}{% if page > 1 %}, page {{ page }}{% endif %} | Example</title>Illustrative values. Change the paths, hostnames and options to match your own site before using it.
The sections below explain what is tested, why it matters and the alternatives.
What we test
Titles are compared across every crawled page, case-insensitively and with surrounding whitespace removed. Any title used on more than one URL is reported with the list of pages sharing it.
Because the crawl is a sample, a duplicate found here usually indicates a pattern rather than an isolated pair: one template producing the same title for a whole class of pages.
Why it matters
Search engines use the title to decide which of several similar pages best answers a query. When the titles are identical the choice is arbitrary, and the two pages split the signals that would otherwise have gone to one.
It is worse for the reader. A results page showing the same headline three times from one site looks like an error, and the click goes elsewhere.
Duplicates are usually structural: paginated listings where every page is "Blog", filtered views that ignore the filter, or product variants that differ only by size. In each case the information needed to distinguish them exists; the template just does not use it.
How to fix it
Put the distinguishing variable into the title. For paginated listings, include the page number; for filters, the filter; for variants, the variant:
<title>{{ category }}{% if page > 1 %}, page {{ page }}{% endif %} | Example</title>Where pages genuinely are duplicates rather than merely similarly titled, the answer is canonicalisation rather than rewriting: point the variants at one URL and let it hold the signals.
Search Console's Pages report groups duplicates under "Duplicate without user-selected canonical", which is a faster way to find the rest of the pattern than crawling for it.
Where this fits
Duplicate titles across pages is check 3 of 13 that the seo & site health audit runs under titles, headings and content, ordered the way they are worth fixing. That ordering is the point: Fixing this one while the check above it still fails buys less than it looks like.
Fix this one first
Above it in the same category sits Page title missing (high), where the title element is the headline of every search result and the label on every browser tab. An attacker who has that does not need this, so it is the better use of the same hour.
What fixing this still leaves open
Duplicate titles across pages closes one route in. Immediately below it: H1 missing, where the H1 is the page's visible headline; Meta description missing, where the meta description is the snippet under the headline; Thin content, where pages with very little body text rarely satisfy the query that brought someone to them, and rarely rank for anything competitive.
Found in the same scan
The seo & site health audit reports this alongside checks from other categories that are at least as serious, including Broken internal links, where an internal link that returns an error is a dead end for the reader and a wasted request for the crawler, and Crawl errors (4xx / 5xx), where uRLs reached during the crawl that returned a client or server error. A single run of seo & site health audit answers all of them at once.
The first few lines
You are a senior web engineer. I ran a security and SEO scanner against my site and it reported the finding below. Fix it properly rather than suppressing the symptom.
Finding: Duplicate titles across pages (medium severity)
Scanner check id: seo-title-duplicateThe rest of this prompt names the pages and line numbers we found the problem on, the configuration to change, and the constraints a good answer has to respect. It is free, it just needs an account so the work is not scraped wholesale.
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