Would This Be Highlighted as Duplicate Meta Desc?
-
Due to the nature of our business we literally have hundreds of web pages and so we recently asked our Web Developers to create the Meta Description for many of the pages that they create - unfortunately they don't seem to understand SEO but before I go back to them I wanted to run this by the MOZ Community...
Here is a snippet of the Meta Desc they have created, personally I'm not happy with it BUT I need to be certain on one thing... Will Google determine that it is (almost) duplicated Meta content?
Why not visit Cape Town on an Africa Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book with us today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Casablanca on an Africa Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Durban on an Africa Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book with us today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Port Elizabeth on an Africa Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Aukland on an Australasia Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Christchurch on an Australasia Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Melbourne on an Australasia Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Sydney on an Australasia Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Orlando on a Caribbean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book with us today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Central America Cruise on a Cruise Destinations with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, benefits and special offers.
Why not visit Acapulco on a Central America Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Puntarenas on a Central America Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not visit Sharm El Sheik on an Egypt And Red Sea with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
Why not take a European Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book with us today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive cruise club benefits.
Why not visit Bangkok on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Halong Bay on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Hong Kong on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Kuala Lumpur on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Okinawa on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Phuket on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Shanghai on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Singapore on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, offers and exclusive benefits.
Why not visit Tokyo on a Far East & Indian Ocean Cruise with XYZ Cruises? Book today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive benefits.
Like I said earlier, there are hundreds of pages more!
I think that if I want total uniqueness then it's going to be a laborious task of doing them all individually but I want to make sure that it is worth it?!
Thanks
Andy
-
I wouldn't bother unless it's a really well-known or well-respected brand within the cruise industry, but then I'd still expect the company name to be visible in the URL or title tag, so not too important. In these situations I try to think from the searcher's point of view - if I'm looking for a cruise - is the brand name important? As I said, not if I haven't heard of them before. George makes good suggestions - if your prices are good then that's likely to drive more click throughs than a brand name, in the limited space you have.
It's also worth bearing in mind that Google may not use your meta description at all if they don't think it matches the searchers intent or content on the resulting page.
-
Also, if your brand is not a household name, include something like "over 100,000 customers" or "Since 1988"--something that reinforces trust/credibility. This will increase your ctr.
-
Personally I would include the company/brand name. If it isn't a blue chip then it does no harm to re-enforce your brand on SERPs, and if it is a blue chip then you potentially stand to increase click-through because of increased trust/recognition.
George
-
Thanks chaps - what is the consensus with regard to having the company name (ie XYZ Cruises) within the Meta Desc?
I have always written Meta Desc with the idea of trying to entice the visitor into clicking through to the site so rather than;
Why not visit Cape Town with XYZ Cruises Book with us today for great cruise deals, special offers and exclusive club benefits.
I would rather write something like;
Visit Cape Town on a World Cruise and see what this amazing city has to offer; from vineyards to beaches all under the backdrop of the majestic Table Mountain
As always your time to reply is very much appreciated!
Andy
-
You're in luck because Matt Cutts covered at least part of this question quite recently, which you can read about/watch here: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2308339/Matt-Cutts-Create-Unique-Meta-Descriptions-for-Your-Most-Important-Pages.
In short - you should hand craft the meta descriptions for your most valuable pages (i.e. the pages you want to rank high in SERPs) but it wouldn't be expected for every meta description on your site due to the amount of work involved.
Personally I think the variance between these auto generated descriptions is still too low and would look for other words to vary them by - for example the type of cruise, the savings, or activities offered on the cruise in each region.
You'll also want to bear in mind a similar problem you're likely to experience with the page Title, Headings and content.
George
-
If the rest of the content on each of those pages is unique and valuable I don't think you should have a problem. I did something similar with the meta descriptions on a website about a year ago as that was the only way at the time to programme them in the time available, and they weren't picked up as duplicates in Google Webmaster Tools (Search Improvements > HTML Improvements).
If you have the resources to make each description completely unique I'd say go ahead, but otherwise I wouldn't worry too much about it as long as the same cut-copy approach isn't taken with the rest of the content on the page.
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
-
Meta tagsTags problem I need help
Hello I have a problem on my site and I want to help solve it I allow adding tags in search engines However, when writing new content, tags are not added to search engines This is my website link تيربو1
On-Page Optimization | | Mosalah20 -
Duplicate content in Shopify reported by Moz
According to Moz crawl report, there are hundreds of duplicate pages in our Shopify store ewatchsale.com. The main duplicate pages are:
On-Page Optimization | | ycnetpro101
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches?page=2
https://ewatchsale.com/collections/all/brand_seiko
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches) https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/gender_mens
(the canonical page should be https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/mens-watches) Also, I want to exclude indexing of pages URLs with "filter parameters" like https://ewatchsale.com/collections/seiko-watches/color_black+mens-watches+price_us-100-200 Shopify advised we can't access our robots.txt file. How can we exclude SE crawling of the page URLs with filter names?
How can we access the robots.txt file?
How can we add canonical code to the preferred collection pages? Which templates and what codes to add? Thanks for your advice in advance!0 -
Avoiding Duplicate Title Tags and Duplicate Content
Hi - I have a question on how to both avoid duplicate title tags and duplicate content AND still create a good user experience. I have a lot of SEO basics to do as the company has not done any SEO to this point. I work for a small cruise line. We have a page for each cruise. Each cruise is associated with a unique itinerary. However the ports of call are not necessarily unique to each itinerary. For each port on the itinerary there are also a set of excursions and if the port is the embark/disembark port, hotels that are associated. The availability of the excursions and hotels depends on the dates associated with the cruise. Today, we have two pages associated with each cruise for the excursions and hotels: mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/excursion/?date=dateinport mycruisecompany.com/cruise/name-of-cruise/port/hotel/?date=dateinport When someone navigates to these pages, they can see a list of relevant content. From a user perspective the list I see is only associated with the relevant date (which is determined by a set of query parameters). Unfortunately, there are situations where the same content is on multiple pages. For instance the exact same set of hotels or excursions might be available for two different cruises or on multiple dates of the same cruise. This is causing a couple of different challenges. For instance, with regard to title tags, we have <title>Hotels in Rome</title> multiple times. I know that isn't good. If I tried to just have a hub page with hotels and a hub page with excursions available from each cruise and then a page for each hotel and excursion, each with a unique title tag, then the challenge is that I don't know how to not make the customer have to work through whether the hotel they are looking for is actually available on the dates in question. So while I can guarantee unique content/title tags, I end up asking the user to think too much. Thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Marston_Gould1 -
Do I need a robots meta tag on the homepage of my site?
Is it recommended to include on the homepage of your site site? I would like Google to index and follow my site. I am using WordPress and noticed my homepage is not including this meta tag, therefore wondering if I should include it?
On-Page Optimization | | asc760 -
Duplicate Page Title
Hi Guys, First off, it's an honour to be a part of this awesome community. I'm using WordPress and getting top 3 rankings for great keywords and I'm very excited, however my page titles are in this format "keyword optimised title here - site name here" eg: "This is my keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is another keyword - this is the name of my blog", "This is a longtail keyword - this is the name of my blog" SEOMoz is reporting errors because of duplicate page title tags due to the "this is the name of my blog" being in every page title. Will this hurt my rankings? Thanks in advance and keep up the great work! Cheers, Troy.
On-Page Optimization | | TroyDean710 -
Duplicate Page Titles?
I'm running a campaign report within SEOmoz & am getting 9 pages that appear on this report. They all happen to be our author pages www.example.com//author/admin We have multiple authors. Is there a proper way that I should take care of this? Also as a side note, I'm using Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin, is there a setting on their I should change that will fix this issue? Or is it an issue at all? Thanks, BJ
On-Page Optimization | | seointern0 -
Will a "no follow" "no index" meta tag resolve duplicate content issue?
I have a duplicate content issue. If the page has already been indexed will a no follow no index tag resolve the issue or do I also need a rel canonical statement?
On-Page Optimization | | McKeeMarketing0 -
What is the recommended length for meta description?
Hello, I am sure this newbie question has been sent millions of times, but I couldn't find it with the new Q&A forum search... So, how many characters should I use in my description meta tag ? Thanks for sharing Loïc
On-Page Optimization | | mandinga0