Having problems resolving duplicate meta descriptions
-
Recently, I’ve recommended to the team running one of our websites that we remove duplicate meta descriptions. The site currently has a large number of these and we’d like to conform to SEO best practice. I’ve seen Matt Cutt’s recent video entitled, ‘Is it necessary for every page to have a meta description’, where he suggests that webmasters use meta descriptions for their most tactically important pages, but that it is better to have no meta description than duplicates. The website currently has one meta description that is duplicated across the entire site.
This seemed like a relatively straight forward suggestion but it is proving much more challenging to implement over a large website. The site’s developer has tried to resolve the meta descriptions, but says that the current meta description is a site wide value. It is possible to create 18 distinct replacements for 18 ‘template’ pages, but any sub-pages of these will inherit the value and create more duplicates. Would it be better to:
- Have no meta descriptions at all across the site?
- Stick with the status quo and have one meta description site-wide?
- Make 18 separate meta descriptions for the 18 most important pages, but still have 18 sets of duplicates across the sub-pages of the site.
Or…is there a solution to this problem which would allow us to follow the best practice in Matt’s video?
Any help would be much appreciated!
-
That sounds like an interesting suggestion and definitely something to look into, thank you. Sadly, the developer for the site is on holiday until next Monday, so I won't be to get an answer until next week.
Theoretically, if the changes were not possible, would it be better to have one single meta description on the home page and none across the rest of the site? Or would it be better to leave the site as it is?
-
I think your best option is to build out your CMS to add values for meta descriptions for each page. You should be able to have your developer build your CMS so that you can inject a meta description value for the page you are working on. This is pretty standard for in-house/WordPress/Drupal.
If your meta description is a site wide value, then the developer has just put one value into the header that loads for every page. You need to be able to customize this as a best practice, as you know. Building 18 template pages is more work than modifying the CMS to inject a meta value, so I wouldn't recommend it.
Is this an option for you?
-
If it is an in-house CMS I see no reason why you can't make your developer do the work to get it exactly how you want it. Otherwise, what's the bloody point in having a bespoke CMS?
Devs will nearly always say things aren't possible when they are. It's a constant battle. I know because I've battled it before.
I should say that I am not involved in this battle currently - our current dev is incredibly accommodating and just does everything I ask - believe me its a breath of fresh air and makes a massive difference. I have a situation where stuff our old dev said was impossible have suddenly become so!
-
Hi there, thanks for the reply. We are using an in-house CMS.
-
What kind of CMS are you using? Is it an in-house one or Wordpress/Drupal/etc.?
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
-
What is your experience so far, with the new Google's Meta Description length up to 320 characters?
I updated a few home pages and some landing pages, so far so good! Although, I wish to know about other experiences, before continue updating. Thanks for your comments!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mª Verónica B.2 -
URLs with parameters + canonicals + meta robots
Hi Moz community! I'm posting a new question here as I couldn't find specific answer to the case I'm facing. Along with canonical tags, we are implementing meta robots on our pages (e-commerce website with thousands of pages). Most of the cases have been covered but I still have one unanswered case: our products are linked from list pages (mostly categories) but they almost always include a tracking parameter (ie /my-product.html?ref=xxx) products urls are secured with a canonical tag (referring only to the clean url /my-product.html) but what would be the best solution regarding the meta robots? For now we opted for a meta robot 'noindex, follow' for non canonical urls (so the ones unfortunately linked from our category/list pages), but I'm afraid that it could hurt our SEO (apparently no juice is given from URLs with a noindex robots), and even maybe prevent bots from crawling our website properly ... Would it be best to have no meta robots at all on these product urls with parameters? (we obviously can't have 'index, follow' when the canonical ref points to another url!). Thanks for your help!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JessicaZylberberg0 -
SEO Title Versus Meta Description Tag
From an SEO perspective, is the title tag more important than the description tag? We use a set format for these tags on our real estate web site. The site contains 300 listings. Sample Title Tag:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Greenwich Village | Office Space Rental| 2300SF $9583/month Sample Description Tag:
Classic Greenwich Village office rental. Hardwood floors, 11' ceiling. 5 oversized windows. 24/7 attended lobby. Renovated common areas. Below market rent. Are we shooting ourselves in the foot by repeating the Square Footage and monthly rent amounts in the title tag? Should this tag be used for a short more descriptive terms so as to maximize the SEO benefit? Should these numbers be listed in the description tag? The listings are not heavily SEO optimized so I don't know whether this is really a non-issue.0 -
Best strategy for duplicate content?
Hi everyone, We have a site where all product pages have more or less similar text (same printing techniques, etc.) The main differences are prices and images, text is highly similar. We have around 150 products in every language. Moz's algorithm tells me to do something about duplicate content, but I don't really know what we could do, since the descriptions can't be changed to be very different. We essentially have paper bags in different colors and and from different materials.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JaanMSonberg0 -
HTTPS Duplicate Content?
I just recieved a error notification because our website is both http and https. http://www.quicklearn.com & https://www.quicklearn.com. My tech tells me that this isn't actually a problem? Is that true? If not, how can I address the duplicate content issue?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | QuickLearnTraining0 -
Duplication Issue?
One of our copywriters has just written a blog to be posted on our own company blog to be reviewed by myself, however I had noticed that the blog post has some duplication issues with one of our own product pages, about 60% duplication, is it still worth posting? Will search engines still index the blog post? Kind Regards,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Paul780 -
Any experience regarding what % is considered duplicate?
Some sites (including 1 or two I work with) have a legitimate reason to have duplicate content, such as product descriptions. One way to deal with duplicate content is to add other unique content to the page. It would be helpful to have guidelines regarding what percentage of the content on a page should be unique. For example, if you have a page with 1,000 words of duplicate content, how many words of unique content should you add for the page to be considered OK? I realize that a) Google will never reveal this and b) it probably varies a fair bit based on the particular website. However... Does anyone have any experience in this area? (Example: You added 300 words of unique content to all 250 pages on your site, that each had 100 words of duplicate content before, and that worked to improve your rankings.) Any input would be appreciated! Note: Just to be clear, I am NOT talking about "spinning" duplicate content to make it "unique". I am talking about adding unique content to a page that has legitimate duplicate content.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AdamThompson0 -
Load balancing - duplicate content?
Our site switches between www1 and www2 depending on the server load, so (the way I understand it at least) we have two versions of the site. My question is whether the search engines will consider this as duplicate content, and if so, what sort of impact can this have on our SEO efforts? I don't think we've been penalised, (we're still ranking) but our rankings probably aren't as strong as they should be. The SERPs show a mixture of www1 and www2 content when I do a branded search. Also, when I try to use any SEO tools that involve a site crawl I usually encounter problems. Any help is much appreciated!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | ChrisHillfd0