Meta Descriptions
-
Hi All,
Just a quick question regarding Meta Descriptions, I am currently looking at a site where an awful lot of the Meta descriptions are similar (not 100% duplicated). The reason being is that the site contains a lot of the same products, but different weights. For example a 500g, 1kg & 2kg version of the same product. Therefore the Metas are same, apart from the weight that's being discussed.
In my opinion the duplication is probably a little too close. Do you think in this circumstance its better to have no Meta descriptions defined at all?
Thanks!
-
I understand what you mean, but let me explain.
For small to medium size stores, this method makes more sense. Why?
1. Easier to add rich snippet markup on pages, due to lower product count
2. Can optimize pages around main keyword, rather than hyper-specific keyword. Example:
"custom t-shirt printing" would be more desirable and have more searches than "red t-shirt printing"
3. If the store has enough products or options, the store will not look thin, and also be vastly easier to navigate.
4. You will be able to spend more time optimizing around your higher level keywords. Example:
"men's collared shirts" rather than "mens black collared shirts". You can include both content and meta data for the individual details.Sample meta: Yourshirtdomain.com is the number one supplier of men's collared shirts in the midwest region. 'different varaitions here'
For some very large sites, they set the sub-pages to no-index and allow the leading page to get them into the store. It's all a matter of how his site is set up, as to what will work best for him and his client.
-
That is a good option but the issue with it is that it makes your site look too thin.
If a user clicks on a brand, they will see 1 product rather than say 10. The 1 product may say 10 colours but I think people with tend to say "ah they dont have much on there".
Also for a small store (compared to the big boys), the ability to rank on colours is key.
My Red T-Shirt can rank and so can my Blue T-Shirt. Rather than my 1 product being T-Shirt - Various Colours or something like that.
I think its only the major players or well established stores who can get away with the 1 product with 10 colour options in.
-
Thanks guys, appreciated.
-
If it's possible, can you combine the products with variables into on page? Using the store's cart and checkout function, I would include a gallery of all the different colors/options, then have the selected options available through a dropdown menu. This way you have one page for a product, with selectable options rather than a large number of pages based around one thing. This may also help with on-page user time as well, since they will sort through the options to find what they are wanting.
-
Fully agree with YNWA and the above article.
When you consider that a meta description has a very small (if measurable at all) influence on your SEO performance nowadays, anything that could potentially be harmful or spammy should be removed.
Your MD is now a shop window - use it to include content that will attract people to your site, are you a local business, your phone number, free delivery, summer sale and so on. If you have a page on your site that you're not actively trying to promote or use to bring people in, I see no problem at all at having a blank MD and letting Google generate one for you.
-
I am in the same boat with an ecommerce store.
Same products but different colours.
I tend to write my own metas but mix it up a bit with colour, fit, size, material, where it is made, free delivery, official stockists etc...
-
Thanks for this.
I have had a look through this before and I suppose the reason I asked the original question was because I consider the Metas to be very similar and not quite duplicated. So its a big of a grey area.
As there is doubt, I think I will remove all Metas for now.
-
Here is a good article and read the comments. Interesting.
http://searchengineland.com/googles-matt-cutts-dont-duplicate-your-meta-descriptions-177706
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
-
"No Meta Description Tag"
Google is not showing Meta Description for the Keyword Rankings of my website in the SERPs. All of my Keywords Ranking are coming with just two fields. Which are just 1. Title Tag & 2. Page URL. The description tag is missing in it. Here is a proof Kindly advice please.
Technical SEO | | seobac1 -
Robots.txt & meta noindex--site still shows up on Google Search
I have set up my robots.txt like this: User-agent: *
Technical SEO | | RoxBrock
Disallow: / and I have this meta tag in my on a Wordpress site, set up with SEO Yoast name="robots" content="noindex,follow"/> I did "Fetch as Google" on my Google Search Console My website is still showing up in the search results and it says this: "A description for this result is not available because of this site's robots.txt" This site has not shown up for years and now it is ranking above my site that I want to rank for this keyword. How do I get Google to ignore this site? This seems really weird and I'm confused how a site with little content, that has not been updated for years can rank higher than a site that is constantly updated and improved.1 -
Google Six Pack Meta Descriptions
Anyone know of some good resources on the way to control the meta descriptions in the Google six pack for a branded search. Google appears to often bypass the meta description and pull random text from the page. We have tested this by adding the brand name to the meta description and this appears to help but doesn't always sort the issue. You often get the same results with the site comand. It not really an SEO issue more a branding one. Anyone get any ideas or resources they can point me at?
Technical SEO | | highwayfive0 -
Is My Boilerplate Product Description Causing Duplicate Content Issues?
I have an e-commerce store with 20,000+ one-of-a-kind products. We only have one of each product, and once a product is sold we will never restock it. So I really have no intention to have these product pages showing up in SERPs. Each product has a boilerplate description that the product's unique attributes (style, color, size) are plugged into. But a few sentences of the description are exactly the same across all products. Google Webmaster Tools doesn't report any duplicate content. My Moz Crawl Report show 29 of these products as having duplicate content. But a Google search using the site operator and some text from the boilerplate description turns up 16,400 product pages from my site. Could this duplicate content be hurting my SERPs for other pages on the site that I am trying to rank? As I said, I'm not concerned about ranking for these products pages. Should I make them "rel=canonical" to their respective product categories? Or use "noindex, follow" on every product? Or should I not worry about it?
Technical SEO | | znagle0 -
Updating Meta Tag error quickly besides submit to index in Webmaster Tools
For a conference page marketing built the meta tag didn't have correct year and date of the conference. I updated and used webmaster tools submit to index to try and get it updated in google search quickly but meta tag has not updated. Are there other avenues to get this corrected?
Technical SEO | | inhouseninja0 -
W3C html5 meta tags invalid?
Dear Mozers, we get errors when validating meta tags in html5. I know it's experimental and not all metas are valid, but how do you handle this? Leave the tags out? here are some examples: `…name="DC.title" content="my content...xyc.." /**>**` ``` `>` ``` `>` ``` `>` ``` `>` `>` I tried to find some information but couldn't. What would you do? Thanks a lot, Barbara
Technical SEO | | barbara-f0 -
Implications of multiple page descriptions?
Are there any implications of using two page description properties, i.e. meta name="<a class="attribute-value">description</a>" and meta property="<a class="attribute-value">og:description</a>"
Technical SEO | | Nathan.Smith0 -
Multiple title and description change is considered spam?
I'm changing title and description several times throught 1-2 months... will Google penalize me? I'm worried that testing several title and description ideas would affect the site rankings on google. Anyone had a problem with that... or can i continue testing as many titles and descriptions as i want?
Technical SEO | | mosaicpro0