Having problems resolving duplicate meta descriptions
-
Recently, I’ve recommended to the team running one of our websites that we remove duplicate meta descriptions. The site currently has a large number of these and we’d like to conform to SEO best practice. I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s recent video entitled, ‘Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description’, where he suggests that webmasters use meta descriptions for their most tactically important pages, but that it is better to have no meta description than duplicates. The website currently has one meta description that is duplicated across the entire site.
This seemed like a relatively straight forward suggestion but it is proving much more challenging to implement over a large website. The site’s developer has tried to resolve the meta descriptions, but says that the current meta description is a site wide value. It is possible to create 18 distinct replacements for 18 ‘template’ pages, but any sub-pages of these will inherit the value and create more duplicates. Would it be better to:
- Have no meta descriptions at all across the site?
- Stick with the status quo and have one meta description site-wide?
- Make 18 separate meta descriptions for the 18 most important pages, but still have 18 sets of duplicates across the sub-pages of the site.
Or…is there a solution to this problem which would allow us to follow the best practice in Matt’s video?
Any help would be much appreciated!
-
That sounds like an interesting suggestion and definitely something to look into, thank you. Sadly, the developer for the site is on holiday until next Monday, so I won't be to get an answer until next week.
Theoretically, if the changes were not possible, would it be better to have one single meta description on the home page and none across the rest of the site? Or would it be better to leave the site as it is?
-
I think your best option is to build out your CMS to add values for meta descriptions for each page. You should be able to have your developer build your CMS so that you can inject a meta description value for the page you are working on. This is pretty standard for in-house/WordPress/Drupal.
If your meta description is a site wide value, then the developer has just put one value into the header that loads for every page. You need to be able to customize this as a best practice, as you know. Building 18 template pages is more work than modifying the CMS to inject a meta value, so I wouldn't recommend it.
Is this an option for you?
-
If it is an in-house CMS I see no reason why you can't make your developer do the work to get it exactly how you want it. Otherwise, what's the bloody point in having a bespoke CMS?
Devs will nearly always say things aren't possible when they are. It's a constant battle. I know because I've battled it before.
I should say that I am not involved in this battle currently - our current dev is incredibly accommodating and just does everything I ask - believe me its a breath of fresh air and makes a massive difference. I have a situation where stuff our old dev said was impossible have suddenly become so!
-
Hi there, thanks for the reply. We are using an in-house CMS.
-
What kind of CMS are you using? Is it an in-house one or Wordpress/Drupal/etc.?
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Are feeds bad for duplicate content?
One of my clients has been invited to feature his blog posts here https://app.mindsettlers.com/. Here is an example of what his author page would look like: https://app.mindsettlers.com/author/6rs0WXbbqwqsgEO0sWuIQU. I like that he would get the exposure however I am concerned about duplicate content with the feed. If he has a canonical tag on each blog post to itself, would that be sufficient for the search engines? Is there something else that could be done? Or should he decline? Would love your thoughts! Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | cindyt-17038
Cindy T.0 -
Measure impact from new meta descriptions
Hi guys, I'm looking to implement new meta descriptions across a site and i want to measure the impact. So far I'm thinking of extracting the CTR data from GWT for the last 90 days to get the most accurate CTR averages for each URL. Then once the new meta descriptions have been implemented, compare the CTR with the old CTR averages accross URLs. Do you think this would be the most accurate way of measuring the impact? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright1 -
Google Not Pulling The Right Title Tag & Meta Description
Hi guys. We've found Google is pulling the wrong information for our title tag and meta description. Instead of pulling the actual title tag, Google is pulling the menu name you click on to get to the page: "Bike Barcelona" instead of "Barcelona Bike Tours | ...." Also, we've found that, instead of pulling the meta description we wrote, Google is using text from the pages copy. Any tips?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | BarcelonaExperience0 -
Hreflang tag could solve any duplicate content problems on the different versions??
I have run across a couple of articles recently suggesting that using the hreflang tag could solve any SEO problems associated with having duplicate content on the different versions (.co.uk, .com, .ca, etc). here is an example here: http://www.emarketeers.com/e-insight/how-to-use-hreflang-for-international-seo/ Over to you and your technical colleagues, I think ….
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JordanBrown0 -
Problem with Google reading https homepage?
Hi Moz Community, In July, we changed our homepage to https via a 301 redirect from http (the only page on our site with https). Our homepage receives an A grade in the ‘On Page Grader’ by Moz for our desired keyword. We have increased our backlink efforts directly to our homepage since we switched to the SSL homepage. However, we still have not increased in search ranking for our specific keyword. Is there something we could have missed when doing the 301 redirect (submitting a new sitemap, changing rotbots.txt files, or anything else??) that has resulted in Google not correctly accessing the https version? (the https page has been indexed by Google). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | G.Anderson0 -
Scanning For Duplicate Canonical Tags
I'm looking for a solution for identifying pages on a site that have either empty/undefined canonical tags, or duplicate canonical tags (meaning the tag occurs twice within the same page). I've used Screaming Frog to view sitewide canonical values, but the tool cannot identify when pages use the tag twice, nor can it differentiate between pages that have an empty canonical tag and pages that have no canonical tag at all. Any help finding a tool of some sort that can assist me in doing this would be much appreciated, as I'm working with tens of thousands of pages and can't do this manually.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | edmundsseo0 -
404 for duplicate content?
Sorry, I think this is my third question today... But I have a lot of duplicated content on my site. I use joomla so theres a lot of unintentional duplication. For example, www.mysite.com/index.php exists, etc. Up till now, I thought I had to 301 redirect or rel=canonical these "duplicated pages." However, can I just 404 it? Is there anything wrong with this rpactice in regards to SEO?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | waltergah0 -
Duplicate content - canonical vs link to original and Flash duplication
Here's the situation for the website in question: The company produces printed publications which go online as a page turning Flash version, and as a separate HTML version. To complicate matters, some of the articles from the publications get added to a separate news section of the website. We want to promote the news section of the site over the publications section. If we were to forget the Flash version completely, would you: a) add a canonical in the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? b) add a link in the footer of the publication version pointing to the version in the news section? c) both of the above? d) something else? What if we add the Flash version into the mix? As Flash still isn't as crawlable as HTML should we noindex them? Is HTML content duplicated in Flash as big an issue as HTML to HTML duplication?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alex-Harford0