Templates for Meta Description, Good or Bad?
-
Hello, We have a website where users can browse photos of different categories. For each photo we are using a meta description template such as:
Are you looking for a nice and cool photo? [Photo name] is the photo which might be of interest to you.
And in the keywords tags we are using:
[Photo name] photos, [Photo name] free photos, [Photo name] best photos.
I'm wondering, is this any safe method? it's very difficult to write a manual description when you have 3,000+ photos in the database.
Thanks!
-
I really like Dana's response - it covers the primary consideration - how much time would it REALLY take to write unique Meta descriptions? If the TRUE answer is "unrealistically too much time", then a template COULD work. The trick though is addressing the issues Dana talks about.
If you only use a primary product name as the variable, you run risks. If you have a 2nd database field you have that includes some differentiation between otherwise identical products, that can help. As long as you understand total length as a consideration.
-
I think this is an excellent question. It's something that was in place where I am the in-house SEO when I came on board. After two years of kicking and screaming, I finally got buy off on doing away with the template. Here's why I didn't like it:
- It caused a lot of duplicate content problems. We have products that might be alike in every way with the exception of a microphone frequency band. Often, this information wasn't included in the product name/title, and consequently, when it was used to populate the meta description "template" we ended up with tons of duplicates.
- Problems with length. We had templated copy that worked just find for about 75% of our brands and products, but some of our brand names and products names were much longer, resulting in the templated descriptions being too long and getting truncated, totally defeating their own purpose.
- Poor user experience. Many of our competitors use templated meta descriptions, specifically Sweetwater, Musician's Friend and Guitar Center. Nearly all of their descriptions are 100% identical with the exception of products swapped in and out. From a searcher's standpoint, this kind of sucks because it doesn't tell me anything interesting about the product.
- Lost marketing opportunity - Are you really going to use the same marketing message for every single product on your site? That's a huge opportunity lost I think.
Okay, maybe if we were a huge brand like Sweetwater, it just wouldn't matter and we could get away with this because brand recognition would be strong enough to outweigh the fact that there was nothing of unique interest in the description...But, we aren't Sweetwater, so making every marketing opportunity count to us is crucial. We have about 3,000 SKUs, and a tiny marketing department. Somehow we're managing to crank out those unique descriptions just fine. 3,000 really isn't that many. If it does get to be too much, scaling this with freelancers would be extremely easy and cheap to do provided you lay down clear parameters for exactly what you want.
My advice? Take the time to add unique descriptions...oh, and forget about populating the meta keywords. You don't need to do that any more.
Hope that's helpful!
Dana
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 Often Can I Change My Meta Titles? (Product Discounts)
Hello, I have an ecommerce website. Due to discounts and sales on most of my products, the discount rates change very often. Some products have %10 discounts for 3 days and then same products might have %50 discounts for another 5 days. I would like to show these product specific discounts on Meta Titles and Descriptions dynamically. My system will automatically update the Meta Titles once the discount on a product changes. My question is, how often can I change the Meta Titles? Is changing them (only discount rates = 1word) too often bad for my SEO? What is Goolge's approach on this? Thank you in advance for all your help. Best,
Technical SEO | | yigitgok
Yigit0 -
Is it good practice to use hreflang on pages that have canonicals?
I have a page in English that has both English & Spanish translations on it. It is pulled in from a page generated on another site and I am not able to adjust the CSS to display only one language. Until I can fix this, I have made the English page the canonical for both. Do I still want to use hreflang for English & Spanish pages? What if I do not have a Spanish page at all. I assume (from what I've read) I should not have an hreflang on the English page. Is this correct? Thank you in advance.
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock0 -
Schema markup for products is missing "price": Is this bad?
Hey guys, So a current client of mine has an e-commerce shop with a few hundred products. They purposely choose to keep the prices off of their website, which is causing errors in Google Webmaster Tools. Basically the error shows: Error: Structured Data > Product (markup: schema.org) Error type: missing price 208 items with error Is this a huge deal? Or are we allowed to have non-numerical prices for schema ie. "call for quote"
Technical SEO | | tbinga1 -
Are descriptions in Social Media Accounts seen as Duplicate Content bt SE?
Hello, I was wondering: If someone (like me) has same or very similar description for all social accounts (eg google plus, linkedin, etc also considering less famous or more specific accounts) profiles, will it be considered as duplicate content by search engines? And what if the content and description will be similar also to the one in the website? Will this be duplicate for the website? Thank you!
Technical SEO | | socialengaged
Eugenio0 -
Auto generated meta description tag in Drupal
Was having issues on Drupal not autogenerating a meta description tag, but I think I have figured it out. Just to verify, would this piece of code be the meta description tag (reason I ask is b/c it looks a little different than the usual tag I have seen):
Technical SEO | | kevgrand0 -
Items 1 to 9 of 22484 total in our Meta Description
Our homepage on our ecommerce site has a category as part of the front page. Unfortunately the top of the category says: Items 1 to 9 of 22484 total Is there a way through GWMT or any other method of stopping Google from adding this on to the front of our Meta Description? Or is the only solution to remove it from the page all together?
Technical SEO | | Benj250 -
Use of Meta Tag - MSSmartTagsPreventParsing
We've inherited some sites from another developer that had the following tag: All references I can find to it are from 2004. What is the purpose and is it worth including in pages/sites we build?
Technical SEO | | wcksmith0 -
Meta tags - better NOT to have?
OK ok . . . the SEOMox report card told me it's actually better NOT to have meta tag keywords on my page, because my competitors can then look at my page to see what words I am trying to target . . . That makes since, but is also painfully counter intuitive. I thought I would just double check and make sure . .. NO META TAGS KEYWORDS? and if so . . .. what (if anything) should I have in the meta tags?
Technical SEO | | damon12120