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Depending on the amount of pages you have on your website depends on the way in which you should look at generating your meta descriptions.

If possible and ideally every page should have a completely unique page title and description.

Obviously, if your website has thousands of pages and products then you might find that an auto generated title and description is necessary for the "parent" product and then a variation of for the "child" products as you stated above, this should not really be used for a search engine ranking however if they are just product variants you would only SEO the lead or parent product and have the variants removed from the search engine crawls to prevent duplication.

This is how all major e-commerce platforms work and why Magento and even the likes of Amazon operate to avoid duplication of data.

Basically they create a master / lead / parent product and "no follow" all of the child products.

Hope this helps.

Something in which is an essential part of any site but I cant for the life of me remember if there is a set / recommended limit to the size if should be or is restricted to.

I would also go with:

Flower Pots - Plastic Flower Pots with Free Delivery | [Brand] (if possible)

If not as Tom says, make sure Free Delivery is stated in the Meta Description and Prominently H1/2 tagged at the top of the page.

This issue can also be a minor issue within the coding. If you have previously had an auto generated or default page title then the site could also still be adding this as well as the new bespoke title given to the page.

I recently had this same issue on one of my sites and I could not figure out what  was causing the issue until I rewrote the code and it stopped.

Thanks for the response,

This was the first thought, but I wasn't 100% sure that hiding it in the robot.txt file should solely remove this issue and it is still early.

Thanks again.

I would say that the sitemap is not needed per say, however, it is good practice to have one, whether it be for client navigation around a site or to assist Google with the root navigation of the website.

From the earlier days in my SEO career I was taught to always incorporate a few standard items as basic procedure as they once you are used to the routine you cannot do any harm if even Google no longer needs then, these were things like sitemap.html, sitemap.xml and robot.txt.

It seems like Google is no longer taking a sitemap for the same purpose as it used to as the technology is advancing, so it now seems like personal preference.

A little bit like the old:

"Which should you do first, On-page SEO or Off-page SEO?" debate.

Hope this helps.

My crawl report is flagging an issue with too many links to one of my pages, this page is my sitemap.html. However, I have coded the page so that if required is specified it generates an .xml version of the page and if not then the html version is displayed. What is the best way to stop the crawl finding the html version whilst maintaining it on the site for clients navigation?

Hello

I couldn't comment on if anyone has a positive repsonse as I have not had this issue but it may be worth just doing all you can in terms of cleaning up your inlinks and then carry on with whitehat techniques and content development whilst you see how bad the penalty is.

It's probably going to take Google a while to get around to your reconsideration request as there are a thousands of sites affected by this (and google aren't exactly going to dedicate massive amounts of man hours to respond asap when the sites are being penalised for manipulating there guidelines)

How long ago did you put through the reconsideration request by the way?

"edit - sorry my iphone bunched my post up!"

Hi

Having the keyword in the URL is helpful in a number of ways;

1.) relevancy to the page
2.) branding
3.) easy of navigation (user experience)
4.) categorisation

It would be far better to include the keyword in the URL for the above reasons but also for future development of ur site.

For example, how would you target the title, page content, alt tags, images, technical info, metadata etc for search engines once you have say 5 different types of tablets? Rather than using ur short URL where all the products are competiting on the same page for rankings it would be much better for each to have a seperate page on ur website.

This will help you not only build targeted, keyword rich, relevant and helpful pages that have seperate rankings but will help to improve your conversion to sale & help lower bounce rates as you customers will land on a page of products they have searched for, as opposed to searching through a page of similar products for what they want.

Hope this helps but I can expand on this if you need!