Is there anything wrong with having duplicate description tags if they are relevant to their pages?

[DA2013]

I have duplicate description tags, but they make sense for the pages they're on. Is there anything wrong with this?

Thanks for reading!

[Ron_McCabe]

No this will work.  It is important that you maintain your categories the right way.  A lot of people confuse these with key words when your tags are your categories that signal the search engines about which category oyu think the content falls into.  It is important to think this out on the front end.  We are in the middle of cleaning up 1200 blog entries that were not categorized properly.  It is a big job at that point.  You don't want to get to this stage.

[carlod]

eyepaq is right. Although it's in the article I referenced, I should have highlighted that duplicates meta descriptions don't incur any search engine penalties.

I was on my iPhone and I'm all thumbs on the best of days

[Graphics_Online_SEO]

Duplicate Meta Description Tags are not a factor in search engine rankings.

The main purpose of Meta Description Tags is to be used as a sales pitch with a call-to-action to entice the user to click on your search result. There's no reason why you can't be a bit creative and vary your sales pitch a bit.

[carlod]

Hi Daniel,

In short yes, you want to avoid duplication. Here is a link to a relevant Moz article:

http://moz.com/learn/seo/meta-description

Get creative and write your descriptions with a little flair. Look at it as a creative exercise, and perhaps also compare the CTR's for different descriptions

Hope that helps!

Carlo

[eyepaq]

No, if those make sense there is no issue with the duplication. (actually even if they don't make sense there is no issue with the duplication).

There is no penalty or filter for duplicate description tags - those are anyway also not part of any ranking factors - are just for CTR - just for the user.

Hope it helps.