Forum post multiple pages gives meta description duplicate.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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!
-
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.
-
Hi Angelos,
There are a few ways you can resolve this issue:
- noindex the page2, page3s by applying any subsequent pages as a rule
- canonicalise all page2 & page3s to the original post URLs
- 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
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
-
Website title duplicates in SEO description
Hi - My website title (company name) repeats in the SEO description. My host service is Square Space. How do I fix this?
Technical SEO | | Peeker
Thanks! Paula board-directors0 -
Duplicate Page Content for www and non-www. Help!
Hi guys, having a bit of a tough time here... MOZ is reporting duplicate content for 21 pages on eagleplumbing.co.nz, however the reported duplicate is the www version of the page. For example: http://eagleplumbing.co.nz and http://www.eagleplumbing.co.nz are considered duplicates (see screenshot attached) Currently in search console I have just updated the non-www version to be set as the preferred version (I changed this back and forth twice today because I am confused!!!). Does anyone know what the correct course of action should be in this case? Things I have considered doing include: changing the preferred version to the www version in webmaster tools, setting up 301 redirects using a wordpress plugin called Eggplant 301 redirects. I have been doing some really awesome content creation and have created some good quality citations, so I think this is only thing that is eaffecting my rank. Any help would be greatly appreciated. view?usp=sharing
Technical SEO | | QRate0 -
Utilising Wordpress Attachment Pages Without Getting Duplicate Content Warnings.
I have a wordpres site that relies heavily on images and their usefulness. Each post links to larger sizes of the images with links back to the post and the "gallery" all images uploaded to the post. Unfortunately this goes against the "rules" and our attachment page show as duplicate content in Google (even though the image titles are different). There must be a way to utlise and make the most of attachment pages without getting duplicate content warnings?
Technical SEO | | DotP0 -
Meta keywords shown in Google SERPS as site description
I'm seeing Google display meta-keywords in the SERP description for some sites (at least a half dozen that I've checked). I BELIEVE IT IS AN AJAX ISSUE BECAUSE: The sites all use AJAX to display content. So the meta-keywords are in the header, and the javascript that displays the content. Non-AJAX parts of the site display properly in Google SERPS The meta-keywords don't visibly appear anywhere on the page. When I turn off images and Javascript in Chrome I don't see any hidden keyword text. I BELIEVE IT IS A GOOGLE-SPECIFIC ISSUE BECAUSE: Each site displays properly in Bing and Yahoo SERPS - the meta-description is the description. However, (as expected) I see the same strange meta-keyword activity in Aol search In Screaming Frog's SERP preview I see the meta-description as the description. Google has been ignoring met-keywords for years. Any idea why it's appearing in the SERPS for these AJAX powered sites? I found one other person who saw that Google may be reading and displaying their content in AJAX even though that content is meant to appear on a different "page". No one on that Google Forum seemed to understand the person's problem. The only reason I get it is because now I'm seeing it with my own eyes. I know the Moz community can do better, so i'm posting about it here.
Technical SEO | | AlexCobb0 -
Duplicate page content & titles on the same domain
Hey, My website: http://www.electromarket.co.uk is running Magento Enterprise. The issue I'm running into is that the URLs can be shortened and modified to display different things on the website itself. Here's a few examples. Product Page URL: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/speakers-audio-equipment/dj-pa-speakers/studio-bedroom-monitors/bba0051 OR I could remove everything in the URL and just have: http://www.electromarket.co.uk/bba0051 and the link will work just as well. Now my problem is, these two URL's load the same page title, same content, same everything, because essentially they are the very same web page. But how do I tell Google that? Do I need to tell Google that? And would I benefit by using a redirect for the shorter URLs? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | tomhall900 -
Crawl Diagnostics and Duplicate Page Title
SOMOZ crawl our web site and say we have no duplicate page title but Google Webmaster Tool says we have 641 duplicate page titles, Which one is right?
Technical SEO | | iskq0 -
CMS on autopilot is happily creating duplicate pages - advice?
Hi, our ecommerce CMS (Magento) is creating a bunch of pages with very little content and no user value like this: http://goo.gl/UU2vl This particular example is the by product of a product filtering page, which has the format www.mywebsite/explore/index/loaddata/id/10/. These pages have no content other than images - also the pages don't have page titles and are therefore being flagged in webmaster tools as requiring HTML improvements We also have CMS auto generated pages like this: www.mysite.comhttp/review/product/list/id/7 where the page is effectively a duplicate of the product page, and this is giving us pages being flagged by webmastertools as having duplicate title tags. Should we exclude these two type of page via robots.txt or take another approach, like not worry about them 🙂 many thanks, any help gratefully received.
Technical SEO | | w1ll1am0 -
Multiple pages - Similar keywords
I'm working on a site with a parent page and two minor pages all dealing with the primary/root keyword "log siding" - How do I optimize all three pages without bastardization of the primary keyword? Parent page - keyword: half-log-siding and log-siding Child Pages (linking from the parent) cedar-log-siding and Pine-log-siding. They all feature "log-siding" and grade well for that keyword (as well as their own long-tail keywords), yet I think based on my rank tracking that Google is unhappy with the multiple pages all (seemingly focused) on log-siding. Any ideas how I can effectively target all the long-tail keywords within their respective landing pages and not draw a penalty from Google towards my parent page and the root keyword? Thanks, Bill
Technical SEO | | Marvo0