How important are unique titles and descriptions?
-
Hi there,
I've recently started working on a very large travel website. One of my main duties is to get it rankings for certain terms (which it is't at the moment, at all!)
A large proportion of the website is dynamic, meaning that the pages, and URLs are produced using sessions. I've already enquired with the company who provide the website about how I can get unique meta data for each page on our website. They came back and said it can be done for the static pages, but not for the dynamic pages. This leaves me with about thousands of pages with duplicated meta data. Not at all ideal.
I was just wondering how damaging this is likely to be to the SEO of my site. Am I going to be able to achieve rankings even with this issue? Or do I need to get it sorted ASAP?
Thanks
-
Wow! Thanks for all the replies!
Funny you should mention that Stephan, thats the exact same solution I put to our providers. Their working on a slightly different solution at the moment, but thats my fallback option.
My main issue is that there would be so many duplicate URLs (tens of thousands!), which the Search Engines would undoubtedly frown upon.
I'll keep you all updated on my progress!
Thanks again
-
It is very important. We also have dynamic pages... a ton of them. However we found a solution by bringing other data already on the page into the description and title. Let's say that each page offers a different vacation package. You should see if the name of the package can be imported into the title and description. Since the data is already there... it can be done.
Come up with some strategy that works with the data you have. For example... with our product pages, we did something like: [product title] - save 35 - 70% at Sierra Trading Post.
-
I agree with Andre, you should definitely go for unique titles and descriptions. Think about your users too: they will see the title tag and possibly the meta description on the SERPS, and it greatly influences a user's decision whether or not to click your search result. You might still achieve rankings without them, but you will not be able to use the full potential of the site.
-
We have just launched a new Travel website aswell. (4 months in the making)
Each page has its own targeted keywords so Meta Descriptions and Title tags for your destination pages are important!!
We found a plugin that allows us to change the "template" for the destination pages.
Tell those guys who built your site that not being able to edit dynamic pages is NOT cool and they need to make a plan!
If you dont put them in, google may decide to rank your home page for keywords instead of the correct tour/product page.
GREG
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
-
How important is using hreflang if u have plenty of other geo signals ?
HI How important is it to use the hreflang attributes and supporting sitemaps (and do you need both) ? Since if sites are being set up on country specific tlds (but on top of WP multisite network.domain.com environment) and geotargeted in GWT, as well as country meta tags and local schema etc etc that should send enough signals shouldnt it 🙂 ? Implementation of hreflang seems like an absolute technical nightmare All Best Dan
Technical SEO | | Dan-Lawrence0 -
Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?
I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products. Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site. Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?
Technical SEO | | znagle0 -
No Access to change duplicate product title and meta tags!?
I have a client who's website contains a php file to dynamically call a product xml file from an external source. I asked the web dev company if there was any way to access or change the titles and meta descriptions to be unique for each product and they said no, not with their system. With about 63 product pages is this going to hurt me trying to get him ranked locally? What is the best to handle a situation like this?
Technical SEO | | satoridesign0 -
Multi page with title with same keywords
Greetings Team, I have a webiste home page optimize for the keyword ''example apartments'' and i have included in the title but that i have another page called site.com/exampleapartments and is optimize for the keyword example apartments How can i make them different ?
Technical SEO | | WorldEscape0 -
Are duplicate page titles fixed by the canonical tag
Google Web Master Tools is saying that some of my pages have duplicate page titles because of pagination. However, I have implemented the canonical tag on the paginated pages which I thought would keep my site from being penalized for duplicate page titles. Is this correct? Or does canonical tag only relate to duplicate content issues?
Technical SEO | | Santaur0 -
Duplicate Title Tags On Blogs
Hello Mozzers, I have a client who has a blog and articles section on their website, due to the amount of content they have in these section they have multiples pages so it would be like.. www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p1 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p2 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p3 www.bluewidgets.com/blog/p4 All obvioulsy with seperate content in each blog/article posts but the meta descriptions on title tags for this p1,p2,p3,p4 and so on are all the same, is this a major issue? and if so how do I fix it?
Technical SEO | | Prestige-SEO0 -
Pdf page titles and descriptions errors
In my weekly crawl report I suddenly have a huge number of title not found and missing page descriptions errors for all of my pdf files. The pdfs do have a page title (defined in the file/properties tab) However these page titles are not being picked up by the crawler or google. Any ideas how do I fix this? ( I am using the Adrobat 9 Distiller)
Technical SEO | | PerriCline0 -
I want my Meta Description re-indexed fast!
We have an old meta description that advertises an old offer (FREE X if you Buy Y) that we are no longer running on the site. I changed the meta description, now what is the fastest way I can get Google to update their SERP with the new description?
Technical SEO | | pbhatt0