Why does GWT fine duplicate descriptions where none exist?
-
On my website, www.heartspm.com, I have been gradually changing over local information to remove near duplicate content. I created templates to create near duplicates for regions (coastal, inland, valley, etc. Then I also have been gradually creating unique pages for each city, such as Poway, Santa Monica, etc. Either way, I have this component of the website built on a list of cities with SEO information unique to each one pulling in template information.
Now to my question: I am getting most of these pages coming up with GWT duplicate meta description information even though the descriptions are quite different between city to city. I am viewing the source page generated as well as the descriptions that are displayed by Google on the search engine. These descriptions do not appear to duplicate to me. So why the error?
-
My pleasure Gerald. Isn't this a great community for help and answers to our seo problems? Im looking forward to mozcon next month. All the best.
-
Thank you for a great answer! I didn't think to look for a second set of meta data. I'm the "user champion and SEO guy." I'll feedyour info to my programmer.
I used to be in programming before the dot.com crash. I found your bug discovery humorous as it brought me back to my old days with the very flucky things we would sometimes discover. That's where experience comes in. You just can't stop when you see what obviously appears correct and start yelling, "Is Google crazy?" There's always a reason and I am thankful that you found this one that has been a huge plague on my site.
-
Thank you so much. I was getting these errors returned in GWT but I didn't think to look for a second set of meta data in the code.
-
The problem your having is that you have duplicate title, description and keyword tags in your source coding. If your using a CMS application, check your template meta settings. I think the template meta data is being added to every page and then you are making each unique on page, but both are being added.
<title>Hearts Pest Control Service of Rancho Bernardo</title>
................................
........................................ -
These pages alll have the same description
http://www.heartspm.com/4s-ranch-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/rancho-bernardo-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/ramona-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/santa-ysabel-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/poway-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/rancho-penasquitos-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/carmel-valley-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/scripps-ranch-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/julian-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/bonsall-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/fallbrook-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/pauma-valley-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/hidden-meadows-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/escondido-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/valley-center-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/the-city-of-san-diego-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/pacific-beach-pest-control.php
http://www.heartspm.com/coronado-pest-control.php
and many more
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
-
URL slash creating duplicate content
Hi All, I currently have an issue whereby by domain name (just homepage) has: mydomain.com and: mydomain.com/ Moz crawler flags this up as duplicate content - does anyone know of a way I can fix this? Thanks! Jack
Technical SEO | | Jack11660 -
All META descriptions gone
Hi there, Since almost a week now, all of my optmized META descriptions has been gone in Google. The last few years Google has always shown all of the optimized META descriptions. My website is an ecommerce site (phone accessories) and all pages have its own unique content (url, text, title, description) and score well in Google. The META descriptions are created by using a template like this: At [brandname] you find lots of [variable category product] * USP 1 * USP 2 * USP 3 All META descriptions differ from each other only by the variable category product. Something tells me this is an effect of the Panda 4.0 update. I tested with a category page by replacing the META description for a 100% unique one. Then I asked Google (via Webmaster tools) to reindex the page. Today the new description got indexed. This means uniqueness is important. My question is: how do I get the optimized META descriptions back? Creating real unique descriptions (means not using a template) for every page is very hard for a webhop since all category pages have the same message to tell (only difference is the type of product), I want to use USP's, and META descriptions of all productpages have been lost too (over 15000 different products). Please help!
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
Thanks in advance. Marcel0 -
Duplicate content or Duplicate page issue?
Hey Moz Community! I have a strange case in front of me. I have published a press release on my client's website and it ranked right away in Google. A week after the page completely dropped and it completely disappeared. The page is being indexed in Google, but when I search "title of the PR", the only results I get for that search query are the media and news outlets that have reported the news. No presence of my client's page. I also have to mention that I found two URLs of the same page: one with lower case letters and one with capital letters. Is this a duplicate page or a duplicate content issue coming from the news websites? How can I solve it? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | Workaholic0 -
Phone Number In Meta Description
People are more likely to call us, than email us. However, if they're using a mobile device, there's a click to call button on that site. My question is this: google does not include our phone number in our meta description. I could try to get the description changed, but it doesn't seem like it would make that big of a deal for just the desktop site. Am I missing something about the importance of the phone number on a desktop site? Any experience with this situation? Thanks, Ruben
Technical SEO | | KempRugeLawGroup3 -
Duplicate page content
Hello, My site is being checked for errors by the PRO dashboard thing you get here and some odd duplicate content errors have appeared. Every page has a duplicate because you can see the page and the page/~username so... www.short-hairstyles.com is the same as www.short-hairstyles.com/~wwwshor I don't know if this is a problem or how the crawler found this (i'm sure I have never linked to it). But I'd like to know how to prevent it in case it is a problem if anyone knows please? Ian
Technical SEO | | jwdl0 -
Duplicates on the page
Hello SEOMOZ, I've one big question about one project. We have a page http://eb5info.com/eb5-attorneys and a lot of other similar pages. And we got a big list of errors, warnings saying that we have duplicate pages. But in real not all of them are same, they have small differences. For example - you select "State" in the left sidebar and you see a list on the right. List on the right panel is changing depending on the what you selecting on the left. But on report pages marked as duplicates. Maybe you can give some advices how to improve quality of the pages and make SEO better? Thanks Igor
Technical SEO | | usadvisors0 -
Issue: Duplicate Pages Content
Hello, Following the setting up of a new campaign, SEOmoz pro says I have a duplicate page content issue. It says the follwoing are duplicates: http://www.mysite.com/ and http://www.mysite.com/index.htm This is obviously true, but is it a problem? Do I need to do anything to avoid a google penalty? The site in question is a static html site and the real page only exsists at http://www.mysite.com/index.htm but if you type in just the domain name then that brings up the same page. Please let me know what if anything I need to do. This site by the way, has had a panda 3.4 penalty a few months ago. Thanks, Colin
Technical SEO | | Colski0 -
Magento and Duplicate content
I have been working with Magento over the last few weeks and I am becoming increasingly frustrated with the way it is setup. If you go to a product page and remove the sub folders one by one you can reach the same product pages causing duplicate content. All magento sites seem to have this weakness. So use this site as an example because I know it is built on magento, http://www.gio-goi.com/men/clothing/tees/throve-t-short.html?cid=756 As you remove the tees then the clothing and men sub folders you can still reach the product page. My first querstion is how big an issue is this and two does anyone have any ideas of how to solve it? Also I was wondering how does google treat question marks in urls? Should you try and avoid them unless you are filtering? Thanks
Technical SEO | | gregster10001