What can I do about missing Meta Description for category pagest etc.?

[SiliconBeachTraining]

On all my campaigns I'm returning high levels of 'Missing Meta Description Tags'. The problem with fixing this is they're all for category, tag and author pages. Is there a way to add a meta description to these pages (there are hundreds) or will it not really have any ranking effect?

[Everett]

Hello SiliconBeachTraining,

"Is there a way to add meta descriptions to these pages?"

That all really depends on what content management system, if any, you are using and how much control you have over it. In theory, it is "possible" to do this with any site, and is highly recommended. In practice, however, you may be stuck with a 3rd party eCommerce vendor who can't or won't give you the fields needed in the back-end of their product to input that data. Even then, there are proxy services that act as a layer over top of your website that can give you greater flexibility.

Assuming you're on a public or open source CMS like Wordpress or Drupal, there are plenty of plugins that let you do this. Just Google "adding content to category and tag pages" or something like that and you'll probably find plenty of resources and tutorials.

Personally, I don't let my tag pages get indexed at all because they tend to be near duplicates of category pages, and of each other. I usually just apply a noindex,follow robots meta tag on those pages.

As for category pages you can cut down the number by making sure paginated pages all reference the main category page using rel prev and rel next tags and applying a noindex,follow robots meta tag on those pages as well (though NOT on the main category pages; just the paginated ones like /2 or ?p=2). I also like to make sure that the first paginated page (i.e./ category/?p=1 or /category/page/1/) always references the main category page (i.e. /category/) as the canonical version in the html header area.

Lastly, if you're going to write custom meta descriptions for each category, you might consider putting that same content as an intro to each category so they have more content than just a list of posts with snippets.

I hope this helps.

Everett @balibones