Same Meta Description on all pages harmful?
-
As the question title suggests, is it harmful (on Google) for a site to use the same meta description sitewide? On every single page.
If not, is there any particular benefit to crafting a unique meta description for every page besides CTR on google searches.
What do you think?
Thanks in advance!
-
Thanks for the response. Appreciate it.
You are absolutely right, it is enough reason. I was just curious to see other reasons to why having unique meta descriptions is the way to go, from someone more experienced!
-
Isn't increased CTR on searches reason enough?
Many different ideas have been discussed regarding meta descriptions. Overall, most argue Google does not factor meta descriptions into rankings.
Personally, I think it would probably still factor in as a quality signal since the text used by Google often changes based on a particular search. If the description doesn't fit the keyword phrase and/or content, Google will often look for other content to use instead. For that reason alone, I would use a different meta description for every page (at the very least, for every page I want indexed) and I would make sure the description fit the content.
-
In my experience it is not harmful. But as you said it is really important to improve your CTR.
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
-
Adding CTAs in Meta Descriptions
Whats peoples opinions about putting Call To Cations CTAs in Meta Descriptions, and does this ever occur a Google penalty, as it can sometimes look a bit clickbait. For example I am looking at a site which currently has this meta description Meta Description: For more information on our sustainable, natural office furniture, click here to get in contact. Is this kind of description ranking unfriendly, Ive seen them used a lot but IM not a big fan of this myself. Any thoughts?
On-Page Optimization | | Donsimong1 -
Why are http and https pages showing different domain/page authorities?
My website www.aquatell.com was recently moved to the Shopify platform. We chose to use the http domain, because we didn't want to change too much, too quickly by moving to https. Only our shopping cart is using https protocol. We noticed however, that https versions of our non-cart pages were being indexed, so we created canonical tags to point the https version of a page to the http version. What's got me puzzled though, is when I use open site explorer to look at domain/page authority values, I get different scores for the http vs. https version. And the https version is always better. Example: http://www.aquatell.com DA = 21 and https://www.aquatell.com DA = 27. Can somebody please help me make sense of this? Thanks,
On-Page Optimization | | Aquatell1 -
Home Page Keywords not Ranking and Assigned to Inside Pages
Hi, thank you for taking the time to read this. We have a few websites with the same problem. I will use http://www.prepared-meals.com as an example: The home page was ranking on page one for keyword "Prepared Meals". The site is about 6 months old. We use the Moz page optimizer on all pages of our websites to score an A rating. Recently we found the home page is no longer showing up in search results and the keyword "prepared meals" now points to an inside page that is not relevant: http://www.prepared-meals.com/Senior-Meals/Moms-Meals-Reviews.html this page shows up for Prepared Meals around page 15 in Google results. We have read keywords in the URL might be the issue, even though the page optimizer in MOZ says to do that. We are wondering if this is the issue or there is some other problem we are not aware of. Again, thank you for you for your time. -Craig
On-Page Optimization | | CraigSWD0 -
Does the title tag on the home page affect sub-pages?
Hello. I am thinking of changing our home page title tag to include our two most valuable keywords from two of our sub-pages. Would this help the rankings of those two sub-pages? Thank you!
On-Page Optimization | | nyc-seo0 -
Mobile Meta Description shorter then Desktop?
I'm pretty sure when I counted the mobile meta description in Google, it's a lot shorter then the recommended 165 char for desktop. Is it shorter or am I just seeing things?
On-Page Optimization | | activitysuper0 -
Duplicate Page Content and Duplicate Page Title
Hi All, I'm new in SEOMoz and have some questions after I have already spend 2-3 days trying to resolve the problems identified from Crawling one of my clients websites. I get quite a lot of Duplicate Page Conntent and Page Titles warnings and trying to find a workaround through the forums and posts. I continuously get this error on most of my pages: URL: http://domain.com/benefits with the same Page but with a WWW in front URL: http://www.domain.com/benefits Any advice will be highly appreciated. Thanks, Athos
On-Page Optimization | | athosk0 -
Should one page with markers or six separate pages?
Hi - I'm working on a site that was set up with 6 bios on one page, with markers jumping to each person's name. I was thinking about separating those into 6 different pages, but not sure if that's the right thing to do. Advice about keeping the bios on one page vs splitting them up? (Am I more likely to rank for those peoples' names if I have a unique page, or is the one page url with each different marker in it, just as good?) Ranking well for those names isn't a huge goal of the site, but it would be nice to make the choice that would help with that rank. Thanks for your input Emma
On-Page Optimization | | emmas0