What this check inspects
Shipwork reads a set of your sitemap pages and keeps the ones that were served directly with a 200, because a redirected page is a copy of the page it lands on and would always look like a duplicate of its target. It normalises each title and description, works out which trailing chunk after a separator appears on more than one page, and treats that chunk as a brand suffix. Stripping the suffix lets a title like Running Shoes | Acme be compared with Running Shoes. It then groups both the exact matches and the near matches for titles and for descriptions, and reports the URLs in each group.
What a failure means
An exact duplicate title or description across two or more pages is an error, because one of the pages cannot be the best answer and the other is competing with it. A near duplicate group, meaning the same text once the brand suffix is removed, is a warning. A site with fewer than two directly served pages returns an informational finding, because there is nothing to compare.
How to fix it
- Give every page a title that states what makes it distinct, and front-load the distinguishing words.
- Write a unique meta description for each page rather than reusing one template with a word swapped.
- If a brand suffix is genuinely needed, keep the text before it unique, because the suffix is stripped for comparison.
- For pages that are true duplicates, consolidate them and keep one canonical address instead of maintaining several.
A typical failure, worked through
The setupA store uses one collection template for red, blue and black running shoes. Each page gets "Running Shoes | Acme" because the colour only appears in the product images, not the title.
What the check reportsThe check strips the shared Acme suffix, finds three pages with the identical base title, and reports the exact duplicate as an error with the URLs in the group.
The pointThe pages differ to a visitor and not to a search engine. The fix is in the title template, one change that resolves every collection at once.