Duplicated Meta Descriptions on Dynamic Paginated Pages
-
If the title didn't put you off please read on!
According to our latest Moz Crawl Report we have circa 700 instances of duplicate Meta Description on pages that are both dynamically created and also paginated, however, I believe that number to be greater!
We are unable to manual make changes to these pages (because they are dynamic) and so we need ask our web devs to create a change in how the Meta is created...
If I am not making myself clear (and there is a good chance that I'm not!) then here is an example of what I mean;
http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/
There are 92 pages of cruise deals for this particular operator with the results of each page having the option to sort by 4 categories;
- Recommended
- Cruise Price
- Sail Date
- Best Value
4 x 92 = 368 instances just for this one operator!
The current Meta Desc is;
A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents.
...which isn't great I know!
The problem is how to make each page (in each category) unique
If any of you have incurred anything similar and have any kind of solution or recommendation then please respond - I would be most grateful!
Andy
-
With the link I see what you mean. Hard to put a variable on a listing like that.
There is possibly another option that would be to use canonical with rel next / previous this defines the relationship to the search engines. Have a look at Google's Webmaster blog here.
Good luck,
Don
-
Thanks for your reply Don but I don't think that is going to work...
Taking this page (page 4) as an example; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/?order_by=departure_date which is categorised by 'sail date'
There are 10 cruises on this page sailing to different destinations on different dates - each cruise opens up a new (child) page where the meta desc is actually correct (unique at least) due to previous web development rules being implemented!
The problem is with the actual 92 (parent) pages - the only solution I can see is to include a page number to the meta...
Something along the lines of;
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by sail date.
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by best value
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by recommended
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by cruise price
Actually I think that works...
Thanks again Don, between us I think we might have cracked it!
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
I have to options. First the easiest. Canonical the pages to the main page. Pretty simple but possibly not the best.
The second solution would be to make the descriptions & titles dynamic as well. For example (I don't have all the info) so bare with me.
Base Description:A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents.
On Category Selection:
$category Silversea Cruise Deals $silversea_deal_1Which would give you these 4 initial descriptions:
- Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals
- Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals
- Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals
- Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals
Then you define the deals..
$silversea_deal_1 = 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499Now you append the variable to the description:
- Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
That is how I typically handle multiple pages that need to rank SEO'wise but have dynamic content. You just find a pattern that you can use and plug in the variables, just like any of the content but you do it inside the SEO part.
Hope that makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Does Google ignore duplicate meta descriptions?
Hi there SEO mozzers, I am dealing with a website that has duplicate meta descriptions (we know is bad).As a punishment, Google totally ignores the meta descriptions and picks content from the website and displays it in SERP. I already read the https://moz.com/blog/why-wont-google-use-my-meta-description but I was wondering if there is more information/knowledge out there. Any tips are appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Europarl_SEO_Team0 -
Duplicate content on product pages
Hi, We are considering the impact when you want to deliver content directly on the product pages. If the products were manufactured in a specific way and its the same process across 100 other products you might want to tell your readers about it. If you were to believe the product page was the best place to deliver this information for your readers then you could potentially be creating mass content duplication. Especially as the storytelling of the product could equate to 60% of the page content this could really flag as duplication. Our options would appear to be:1. Instead add the content as a link on each product page to one centralised URL and risk taking users away from the product page (not going to help with conversion rate or designers plans)2. Put the content behind some javascript which requires interaction hopefully deterring the search engine from crawling the content (doesn't fit the designers plans & users have to interact which is a big ask)3. Assign one product as a canonical and risk the other products not appearing in search for relevant searches4. Leave the copy as crawlable and risk being marked down or de-indexed for duplicated contentIts seems the search engines do not offer a way for us to serve this great content to our readers with out being at risk of going against guidelines or the search engines not being able to crawl it.How would you suggest a site should go about this for optimal results?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | FashionLux2 -
I have 2 keywords I want to target, should I make one page for both keywords or two separate pages?
My team sells sailboats and pontoon boats all over the country. So while they are both boats, the target market is two different types of people... I want to make a landing page for each state so if someone types in "Pontoon Boats for sale in Michigan" or "Pontoon boats for sale in Tennessee," my website will come up. But I also want to come up if someone is searching for sailboats for sale in Michigan or Tennessee (or any other state for that matter). So my question is, should I make 1 page for each state that targets both pontoon boats and sailboats (total of 50 landing pages), or should I make two pages for each state, one targeting pontoon boats and the other sailboats (total of 100 landing pages). My team has seen success targeting each state individually for a single keyword, but have not had a situation like this come up yet.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | VanMaster0 -
Does Google View "SRC", "HREF", TITLE and Alt tags as Duplicate Content on Home Page Slider?
Greetings MOZ Community. A keyword matrix was developed by my SEO firm. I am in the process of integrating primary, secondary and terciary phrases into the text and am also sprinkling three or four other terms. Using a keyword density tool (http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.php) the results were somewhat unexpected after I optimized. So I then looked at the source code and noticed text from HREF, ALT and SRC tags that may be effecting how Google would interpret text on the page. Our home page (www.nyc-officespace-leader.com) contains a slider with commercial real estate listings. Would Google index the SRC, HREF, TITLE and ALT tags in these slider items? Would this be detrimental to SEO? The code for one listing (and there are 7-8 in the slider) looks like this: | href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York">Class A Fifth Avenue Offices class="blockLeft"><a< p=""></a<> href="http://www.nyc-officespace-leader.com/listings/305-fifth-avenue-office-suite-1340sf" title="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York"> src="http://dr0nu3l9a17ym.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/fsrep/houses/125x100/305.jpg" alt="Lease a Prestigious Fifth Avenue Office - Manhattan, New York" width="125" height="94" /> 1,340 Sq. Ft. $5,918 / month Fifth Avenue Midtown / Grand Central <a< p=""></a<> | Could the repetition of the title text ("lease a Prestigious Fifth...") trigger a duplicate content penalty? Should the slider content be blocked or set to no-index by some kind of a Java script? We have worked very hard to optimize the home page so it would be a real shame if through some technical oversight we got hit by a Google Panda penalty. Thanks, Alan Thanks
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan10 -
How do i prevent Google and Moz from counting pages as duplicates?
I have 130,000 profiles on my site. When not Connected to them they have very few differences. So a bot - not logged in, etc, will see a login form and "Connect to Profilename" MOZ and Google call the links the same, even though theyre unique such as example.com/id/328/name-of-this-group example.com/id/87323/name-of-a-different-group So how do i separate them? Can I use Schema or something to help identify that these are profile pages, or that the content on them should be ignored as its help text, etc? Take facebook - each facebook profile for a name renders simple results: https://www.facebook.com/public/John-Smith https://www.facebook.com/family/Smith/ Would that be duplicate data if facebook had a "Why to join" article on all of those pages?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | inmn0 -
Duplicate peices of content on multiple pages - is this a problem
I have a couple of WordPress clients with the same issue but caused in different ways: 1. The Slash WP theme which is a portfolio theme, involves setting up multiple excerpts of content that can then be added to multiple pages. So although the pages themselves are not identical, there are the same snippets of content appearing on multiple pages 2. A WP blog which has multiple categories and/or tags for each post, effectively ends up with many pages showing duplicate excerpts of content. My view has always been to noindex these pages (via Yoast), but was advised recently not to. In both these cases, even though the pages are not identical, do you think this duplicate content across multiple pages could cause an issue? All thoughts appreciated
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Chammy0 -
Duplicate page titles Wordpress SEO/Yoast
Hi I have a Wordpress site using the Wordpress SEO plugin by Yoast. Everything appears to be fine except that on 1 Feb SEOMoz crawl suddenly picked up a bunch of errors. The errors are duplicate page titles, and these exist only for the mysite.com/page/X pages. I can't find any setting in Yoast that looks wrong or tells me how to fix this. The pages are also dynamically canonicalizing to themselves - not sure if this makes any difference although I don't know how this is happening. Does anyone know how to fix this duplicate title error? Alex
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | alextanner0 -
Can you use more than one meta robots tag per page?
If you want to add both "noindex, follow" and "noopd" should you add two meta robots tags or is there a way to combine both into one?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | nicole.healthline0