Bogus duplicate meta descriptions in GWT
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UPDATE:
The same type of error (returning a page structure with no content and no CSS) can be replicated by adding a trailing slash to any valid URL.This leads me to believe that there is a problem on the server. It should be serving the custom 404 page instead of junk.
I have fixed the "ezine" directory problem by doing a wildcard 301 on that directory, so you can ignore that issue.
We are experiencing issues on one of our sites that we cannot resolve. It is an issue that many sites seem to have, according to discussions within the Google Webmaster Tools forum. We have tried several of the suggestions made in that forum, without success.
We need somebody to help us resolve this:
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who has experience with this issue
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who knows exactly what is causing it
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who knows how to fix it
Definition of Problem
Location:
Google Webmaster Tools | Optimization | HTML Improvements | Duplicate meta descriptions (similar issues also appear in the same area under Duplicate title tags)By drilling down into a listed error, we see two versions of the problem:
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Multiple instances of the page are displayed, and appended to the URL is another URL of a page that has no relationship to the first. The screenshot also shows a directory (/ezine) that was deleted and renamed. See attached pic
duplicatemetadescriptions1.jpg -
Also by drilling down in the same way, some of the instances show unique URLs, but the ones listed (other than the correct one), do not exist. See attached pic
duplicatemetadescriptions2.jpg
Please offer only KNOWN solution(s).
Thank you.
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What do you mean by "The /ezine dir is still working for me"?
What do you mean by "other issues"?
I appreciate your response, but making statements like that is not very helpful.
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Argh, don't make me pull up archive.org!
I see they are bogus, but have they always been bogus? Did you recently update the descriptions? When was Googlebot last on these pages?
There are several other issues with the site & URL structure I would address before fretting about meta descriptions.
The /ezine dir is still working for me. If I can access it, surely Google still can.
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