Unique meta descriptions for 2/3 of it, but then identical ending?
-
I'm working on an eCommerce site and had a question about my meta descriptions. I'm creating unique meta descriptions for each category and subcategory, but I'm thinking of adding the same ending to it. For example: "Unique descriptions, blah blah blah. Free Overnight Shipping..". So the "Free Overnight Shipping..." ending would be on all the categories. It's an ongoing promo so I feel it's important to add and attract buyers, but don't want to screw up with duplicate content. Any suggestions? Thanks for your feedback!
-
You don't get penalized for duplicate meta descriptions. You could have every one on your site the exact same, it won't matter. It doesn't impact rankings. It impacts how likely a searcher is to click through to your website.
-
Hi,
When it comes to Meta descriptions here are the different things you might want to consider:
- Should be more than 100 characters and under 150 characters.
- Should incorporate the primary keyword you targeted
- Should provide valuable and compelling reason for the user to visit the page by including keywords in a conversational format.
- Should be unique.
Unique means different for every single page on your website. As long as it is different -even if it's a word- SE won't consider it as duplicate ;). And yes, you're right, it's always good to mention your services such as free shipping, discounts etc...
Good luck, On-Page Optimization takes time but it's worth it
-
Hi-
I'm not sure how much meta-descriptions really matter for duplicate content purposes, I believe they are mostly used for display in the SERPS. Either way, sounds like they will be somewhat unique and if the page content is unique I don't think you would have an issue.
Good Luck
Ken
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
-
One page with multiple sections - unique URL for each section
Hi All, This is my first time posting to the Moz community, so forgive me if I make any silly mistakes. A little background: I run a website that for a company that makes custom parts out of specialty materials. One of my strategies is to make high quality content about all areas of these specialty materials to attract potential customers - pretty strait-forward stuff. I have always struggled with how to structure my content; from a usability point of view, I like just having one page for each material, with different subsections covering covering different topical areas. Example: for a special metal material I would have one page with subsections about the mechanical properties, thermal properties, available types, common applications, etc. Basically how Wikipedia organizes its content. I do not have a large amount of content for each section, but as a whole it makes one nice cohesive page for each material. I do use H tags to show the specific sections on the page, but I am wondering if it may be better to have one page dedicated to the specific material properties, one page dedicated to specific applications, and one page dedicated to available types. What are the communities thoughts on this? As a user of the website, I would rather have all of the information on a single, well organized page for each material. But what do SEO best practices have to say about this? My last thought would be to create a hybrid website (I don't know the proper term). Have a look at these examples from Time and Quartz. When you are viewing a article, the URL is unique to that page. However, when you scroll to the bottom of the article, you can keep on scrolling into the next article, with a new unique URL - all without clicking through to another page. I could see this technique being ideal for a good web experience while still allowing me to optimize my content for more specific topics/keywords. If I used this technique with the Canonical tag would I then get the best of both worlds? Let me know your thoughts! Thank you for the help!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jaspercurry0 -
Cloaking/Malicious Code
Does anybody have any experience with software for identifying this sort of thing? I was informed by a team we are working with that our website may have been compromised and I wanted to know what programs people have used to identify cloaking attempts and/or bad code. Thanks everybody!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | HashtagHustler0 -
Does this graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit?
Hello,Does the attached graph look like a Penguin 2.0 hit? Keep in mind that on our eCommerce site most purchases are from return customers. I forgot to add here that we cut a bunch of paid links in May 2013 as well. We quit cutting paid links when our rankings dropped - we thought it was the paid links. We currently have 30% paid links. Penguin 2.0 was on May 22. ga2.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BobGW0 -
301 redirect a set of pages to one landing page/URL?
I'm planning to redirect the following pages to one new URL/landing page: Old URLs: http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/1 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/2 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/3 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/4 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/5 http://www.olddomain.com/folder/page/6 New URL: http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Code in .htaccess that I will be using: RedirectMatch 301 /folder/page/(.*) http://www.newdomain.com/new-folder/new-page Let me know if this is correct. Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
Do I need to use meta noindex for my new website before migration?
I just want to know your thoughts if it is necessary to add meta noindex nofollow tag in each page of my new website before migrating the old pages to new pages under a new domain? Would it be better if I'll just add a blockage in my robots.txt then remove it once we launch the new website? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | esiow20130 -
My ranking dropped 3 pages on 18 november 2012
Hi There my site ranking dropped suddenly today for my main keywords such as security companies in london and security services in london from first page to 4th-5th page. these keywords were ranked on homepage http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/ other keywords from some internal pages, such as this one http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/security-services/event-security-london.html theygot hit slightly and went couple of listings down the road for event security london, event security companies london as well. same slight hitting happened on this page for main keywords http://www.armstrongsecurity.co.uk/bodyguard-for-hire-london.html can anyone help me, how to get the rankings back? my site authority is around 60 which is far better than most sites ranking higher than me now. these are some problems that i understand so far. keyword rich anchor text link profile for my main keywords over optimised pages let me know if anything you might find suspicious on my site that i can fix either on site or in my link profile. looking forward to your help. thanks gill
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | spciuk0 -
Vendor Descriptions for SEO... Troublesome?
Howdy! I have been tossing this idea around in my head over the weekend and I cannot decide which answer is correct, so here I am! We a retailer of products and is currently in the midst of redesigning our site-- not only design but also content. The issue that we are facing is with product descriptions from our vendors. We are able to access the product descriptions/specs from their websites and use them on ours, but my worry is that we will get tagged for duplicate content. Other retailers (as well as the vendors) are using this content as well, so I don't want this to have an adverse effect on our ranking. There are so many products that it would be a large feat to re-write unique content-- not to mention that the majority of the rhetoric would be extremely similar. What have you seen in your experiences in similar situations? Is it bad to use the descriptions? Or do we need to bite the bullet and do our best to re-write hundreds of product descriptions? Or is there a way to use the descriptions and tag it in a way that won't have Google penalize us? I originally thought that if we have enough other unique content on our site, that it shouldn't be as big of a deal, but then I realized how much of our site's structure is our actual products. Thanks in advance!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | jpretz0 -
Improve CTR with Special Characters in Meta-Description / Title Tags
I've seen this question asked a few times, but I haven't found a definitive answer. I'm quite surprised no one from Google has addressed the question specifically. I ran across this post the other day and it piqued my interest: http://www.datadial.net/blog/index.php/2011/04/13/special-characters-in-meta-descriptions-the-beboisation-of-google/ If you're able to make your result stand out by using stars, smiley faces, TM symbols, etc it would be a big advantage. This is in use currently if you search for a popular mattress keyword in Google. It really is amazing how the special characters draw your attention to the title. You can also see the TM and Copyright symbols if you search for "Logitech Revue" Radioshack is using these characters in their adwords also. Has anyone found any definitive answers to this? Has anyone tracked CTR and long-term results with special characters in title or description tags? Any chance of getting penalized for using this? As a follow-up, it looks like you could also put check symbols into your meta-description tags. That has all kinds of interesting possibilities. http://www.seosmarty.com/special-symbols-wingdings-for-social-media-branding-twitter-linkedin-google-plus/
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseninja0