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Blog and publisher sites: template fixes

Duplicate archives, repeated titles, missing dates and authors, and unhelpful images, with what Google's Article documentation actually recommends.

By Metryn · Updated 16 October 2026 · 4 min read

Short answer: a blog's problems are rarely about writing. They're usually duplicate archives, repeated titles, missing dates and authors, and images with no text. All fixable at the template level.

Mistakes to look for

  • Tag, category, author and date archives that repeat the same posts and share a title pattern.
  • The same article reachable under several URLs (with and without a category in the path, with parameters).
  • No visible date, or a "last updated" date that doesn't match anything in the markup.
  • A byline that's a username, or no author at all.
  • Hero images with no alt text and filenames like IMG_4021.jpg.

Article markup, kept honest

Google's Article documentation says there are no required properties. It recommends headline, image, datePublished, dateModified and author with a name and a URL. Dates should be in ISO 8601 and include a time zone, otherwise Google falls back to the time zone of Googlebot. Put only the person's name in the author name field, with no job title or publisher, and list multiple authors as separate entries.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "BlogPosting",
  "headline": "Your article title",
  "image": ["https://example.com/photo.jpg"],
  "datePublished": "2026-10-01T09:00:00+01:00",
  "dateModified": "2026-10-12T14:30:00+01:00",
  "author": [{
    "@type": "Person",
    "name": "Author Name",
    "url": "https://example.com/about/author-name"
  }]
}

Titles and duplicates

Titles should be unique and describe the post. Google says repeated or boilerplate titles can lead it to add its own distinguishing details. For duplicates, a self-referencing canonical on each post and consistent internal links to that one URL is what Google recommends. Decide whether date and tag archives need to be indexed at all, and if they don't, use noindex rather than hoping they'll be ignored.

Images

Use <img> elements, descriptive filenames and alt text that describes the picture in the context of the article. Google counts keyword-stuffed alt text as a negative.

A caveat on dates: only update dateModified when the article changed in a way a reader would care about. Changing it to look fresh doesn't help anyone, and it's the kind of mismatch between markup and page that creates trouble.

A short audit you can do in an hour

Pick the ten posts that bring the most visits and open each one. Look at five things: the title, the date, the author, the main image and the URL. Write down what's missing. You'll usually find the same two or three gaps repeated, which is good news, because they come from the template.

Then open a tag page, a category page and a date archive. Ask whether a reader arriving there would find something they can't find elsewhere. If the page is only a list of the same posts with a different heading, it's a candidate for noindex. If it's a real, curated page with an introduction, keep it and give it its own title.

Last, search your site for the same sentence from two different posts. Duplicate or near-duplicate paragraphs across posts, such as boilerplate intros, are easy to miss and easy to fix.

Questions people ask

Do I need Article markup to be indexed?

No. Google's documentation says there are no required properties, and that the markup helps it understand the type, author and title. It isn't a condition for being indexed or listed.

How should I write author names?

Only the person's name in the name field. Google says to leave out job titles, honorifics, publisher names and introductory phrases, to use Person for people and Organization for organizations, and to list multiple authors as separate entries.

What time zone should dates use?

Use ISO 8601 and include a time zone. Google says that without one it uses the time zone of Googlebot, which can shift the date.

Should tag and category archives be indexed?

That's your call, and it depends on whether those pages offer something a reader would want. If they only repeat posts, noindex is a reasonable way to keep the index tidy, as long as you don't block them in robots.txt as well.

What to do this week

  • Open three archive pages and decide whether each deserves to be indexed.
  • Check that each post shows a date, an author and a unique title.
  • Add alt text and descriptive filenames to the ten most-read posts' images.
  • Check that each post has a single canonical URL.

Check your own site

Paste your address below. The free scan looks at robots.txt, your sitemap, access for the main AI crawlers and structured data, and shows what it found in seconds. It tells you what a machine can fetch and read. It doesn't predict rankings or citations.

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