Forum post multiple pages gives meta description duplicate.

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

My website has a forum that is using the title of the posts as a Meta Description.The problem is that when a posts becomes long and separates in pages Google tells me that i have duplicate meta description issues because the 2nd page and the 3rd page are using the same meta description.What is the best course of action here?

[Ray-pp]

I don't think canonicalization would be inappropriate here. Each page is different, but each page of a forum topic is supporting the OPs' main post on the first page. You can canonical the subsequent pages and pass the authority to the main page so it ranks highest.

If someone uses a specific search term that another person used on page 4 of the topic, that page will still show in Google's SERPs and direct the user to the deeper page, rather than the main page. So, we're not applying a canonical tag because of duplicate content issues, but to support the forum topic's parent theme.

I suggest adding rel/next logic to your site's theme and let Google rank the subsequent pages accordingly. Once proper canonical and rel/next tags are implemented, I wouldn't worry about duplicate meta information.

[StelinSEO]

In my experience the only way to resolve that is to write unique descriptions or have Google skip the pages.

There is also Pagination, but I've seen cases where after implementing the next and prev code it still was serving Duplicate description errors.

Hope you find your answer!

[Angelos_Savvaidis]

No indexing the rest of the pages means less results on SERP.

Canonicalising the other pages to page 1 is kinda wrong since its not duplicate content and passing all the link juice to just page 1 is not such a good idea.

[StelinSEO]

Hi Angelos,

There are a few ways you can resolve this issue:

1. noindex the page2, page3s by applying any subsequent pages as a rule
2. canonicalise all page2 & page3s to the original post URLs
3. update your robots.txt file to block page2 and page3 by using Disallow: /*/page2, Disallow: //*page3

Any of the above will resolve your issue, just comes down to which is the easiest for you to implement.

Feel free to tweet me at @StelinSEO if you've got any further questions

Stel