Duplicated Meta Descriptions on Dynamic Paginated Pages
-
If the title didn't put you off please read on!
According to our latest Moz Crawl Report we have circa 700 instances of duplicate Meta Description on pages that are both dynamically created and also paginated, however, I believe that number to be greater!
We are unable to manual make changes to these pages (because they are dynamic) and so we need ask our web devs to create a change in how the Meta is created...
If I am not making myself clear (and there is a good chance that I'm not!) then here is an example of what I mean;
http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/
There are 92 pages of cruise deals for this particular operator with the results of each page having the option to sort by 4 categories;
- Recommended
- Cruise Price
- Sail Date
- Best Value
4 x 92 = 368 instances just for this one operator!
The current Meta Desc is;
A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents.
...which isn't great I know!
The problem is how to make each page (in each category) unique
If any of you have incurred anything similar and have any kind of solution or recommendation then please respond - I would be most grateful!
Andy
-
With the link I see what you mean. Hard to put a variable on a listing like that.
There is possibly another option that would be to use canonical with rel next / previous this defines the relationship to the search engines. Have a look at Google's Webmaster blog here.
Good luck,
Don
-
Thanks for your reply Don but I don't think that is going to work...
Taking this page (page 4) as an example; http://www.bolsovercruiseclub.com/cruise-deals/silversea-cruise-deals/?order_by=departure_date which is categorised by 'sail date'
There are 10 cruises on this page sailing to different destinations on different dates - each cruise opens up a new (child) page where the meta desc is actually correct (unique at least) due to previous web development rules being implemented!
The problem is with the actual 92 (parent) pages - the only solution I can see is to include a page number to the meta...
Something along the lines of;
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by sail date.
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by best value
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by recommended
Page 4 of Silversea cruise deals to over 800 destinations across all 7 continents ordered by cruise price
Actually I think that works...
Thanks again Don, between us I think we might have cracked it!
Andy
-
Hi Andy,
I have to options. First the easiest. Canonical the pages to the main page. Pretty simple but possibly not the best.
The second solution would be to make the descriptions & titles dynamic as well. For example (I don't have all the info) so bare with me.
Base Description:A selection of the best Silversea cruise deals taking in over 800 destinations across all 7 continents.
On Category Selection:
$category Silversea Cruise Deals $silversea_deal_1Which would give you these 4 initial descriptions:
- Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals
- Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals
- Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals
- Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals
Then you define the deals..
$silversea_deal_1 = 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499Now you append the variable to the description:
- Recommended Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Cruise Price Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Sail Date Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
- Best Value Silversea Cruise Deals 4 Day 3 Night Key West To Bahama's $499
That is how I typically handle multiple pages that need to rank SEO'wise but have dynamic content. You just find a pattern that you can use and plug in the variables, just like any of the content but you do it inside the SEO part.
Hope that makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Google webcache of product page redirects back to product page
Hi all– I've legitimately never seen this before, in any circumstance. I just went to check the google webcache of a product page on our site (was just grabbing the last indexation date) and was immediately redirected away from google's cached version BACK to the site's standard product page. I ran a status check on the product page itself and it was 200, then ran a status check on the webcache version and sure enough, it registered as redirected. It looks like this is happening for ALL indexed product pages across the site (several thousand), and though organic traffic has not been affected it is starting to worry me a little bit. Has anyone ever encountered this situation before? Why would a google webcache possibly have any reason to redirect? Is there anything to be done on our side? Thanks as always for the help and opinions, y'all!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | TukTown1 -
Google W.M.T Missing Meta Title on AJax Pages... Weird!!
Hey Mozers, I was looking through my Google Web Masters Tool under HTML Improvements. It looks like I have 2,200 pages missing Meta Titles and I was about to lose it thinking HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN! I came to realize that the pages were "Ajax Pages". This is specifically a checkprice pop up and I dont want this page crawled by google. It looks like to google I have over 2k pages missing Meta Titles and they are all "check price pop ups". How would you suggest I block this. I thought about going the easy route and removing the subfolder and putting it in the Robots.txt document and I'm scared of that because we use AJax for a bunch of calls. I'm also scared of putting in the head <metaname="robots" =="" noindex,nofollow"="">because it requires hard coding</metaname="robots"> I Know i'm not the first to come across this issue, Any Ideas??
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | rpaiva0 -
Internal Duplicate Pages causing dip in rankings
Hi Guys, Need help in understanding whether having duplicate pages on your site push you down in rankings. Our all product pages getting indexed by Google with different parameters i.e. filters, affiliate id, utm_source etc. and then we have 10-15 duplicate for one product page. I am observing dip in rankings whenever Google starts indexing these duplicate but when I asked this question to John Muller and other Google team they said if you set up canonical then you don't have to worry about having different urls for same page but we are not ranking on Google and if we do then we dropped from page 1 to page 2 or sometimes page 3. Example - http://goo.gl/G5p3X5 Any suggestions.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Webmaster_SEO0 -
Rel=next/prev for paginated pages then no need for "no index, follow"?
I have a real estate website and use rel=next/prev for paginated real estate result pages. I understand "no index, follow" is not needed for the paginated pages. However, my case is a bit unique: this is real estate site where the listings also show on competitors sites. So, I thought, if I "no index, follow" the paginated pages that would reduce the amount of duplicate content on my site and ultimately support my site ranking well. Again, I understand "no index, follow" is not needed for paginated pages when using rel=next/prev, but since my content will probably be considered fairly duplicate, I question if I should do anyway.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | khi50 -
Duplicate pages with http and https
Hi all, We changed the payment part of our site to https from http a while ago. However once on the https pages, all the footer and header links are relative URLs, so once users have reached the payment pages and then re-navigate back to other pages in our website they stay on https. The build up of this happening has led to Google indexing all our pages in https (something we did not want to happen), and now we are in the situation where our homepage listing on Google is https rather than http. We would prefer the organic listings to be http (rather than https) and having read lots on this (included the great posts on the moz (still feels odd not refering to it as seomoz!) blog around this subject), possible solutions include redirects or a canoncial tags. My additional questions around these options are: 1. We already have 2 redirects on some pages (long story), will another one negatively impact our rankings? 2. Is a canonical a strong enough hint to Google to stop Google indexing the https versions of these page to the extent that out http pages will appear in natural listings again? If anyone has any other suggestions or other ideas of how to address this issue, that would be great! Thanks 🙂 Diana
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Diana.varbanescu0 -
Meta tag description Usage
Do i wanna put meta tags as separate description that is not in the particular web page ,Normally i put meta description as 155 character from first paragraph of the web page .so do i need put a unique meta description ?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | innofidelity0 -
Good idea? Dynamic to Perkalink URLs for over 10k pages.
Hey guys, We're looking for someone who has already done this. We know permalinks are SEO best practices but changing site stucture can cause alot of ranking and traffic loss. Is it a wise idea to make the transition? How long will we see a dip in rankings before bouncing back?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SherisRanch0 -
Will Google Visit Non-Canonicalized Page Again and Return Its Page's Original Ranking?
I have 2 questions about canonicalization. 1. Will Google ever visit Page A again if after it has been canonicalized to Page B? 2. If Google will still visit Page A and found that it is not canonicalizing to Page B already, will the original rankings and traffic of Page A returned to the way before it's canonicalized? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | globalsources.com0