Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
-
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions.
My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog.
Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content?
Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created?
While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it?
Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please.
Thanks,
Iain.
-
Thanks, Tom - I'll have a go at that and make an actual robots.txt file and upload it.
It is odd though and when I was creating my WP pages there are Yoast Options for each page - several of them I set to noindex, though looking at the virtual robots.txt, these isn't the case. My file just has:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/Thanks again for all your help,
Iain.
-
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/robotstxt-file-4
Thats about the only thing I can find on it. Hope you can gleam some use out of it. Seem rather complicated for such an easy task.
-
Cheers Tom,
Yeah it is rather strange. There doesn't appear to be another plugin that should be causing this. Yoast is certainly the one relating to SEO.
Iain.
-
I think this is where I run out of useful things to add. That seems very odd to me.
Do you have any other plugins active that might be producing a robots.txt file?
-
Thanks Tom,
When I click Edit Files in Yoast it says:
"If you had a robots.txt file and it was editable, you could edit it from here."And yet, I do have one (albeit it appears a virtual one) as it can be viewed here:
http://www.iainmoran.com/robots.txtIf I try to view the site files on the server, via FTP or CPanel, there is no robots.txt file there!
I appear to be using the latest version of Yoast.
Thanks,
Iain.
-
Hey Iain,
There is a way to edit the file with Yoast. It should have a section called Edit Files when you click on the "SEO" part on the left hand side of your Wordpress dashboard. Once in there you should see robots.txt on the top. If you dont see it you might need to upgrade to the newest version of Yoast.
Thanks,
Tom
-
Thanks so much for your reply, Tom - very useful indeed!
I'm using Yoast SEO for WordPress, which apparently creates a virtual robots.txt and I can't see anyway to edit it as such. Unlike the posts themselves, which I can set to "noindex", the dynamic pages I cannot.
Unless I make my own robots.txt and upload it to my server, but I'm concerned that it will confuse matters and conflict with the one created/managed by Yoast?
Thanks again,
Iain.
-
Hey Iain,
I would do custom meta descriptions if possible. Meta descriptions are generally used to "sell" the content. They dont have any effect on ranking and if you dont feel like adding custom content to them, Google will just display the first content the page automatically. It is not considered duplicate content.
I would also probably get rid of those blog index pages from your xml sitemap and no index them if you can with meta robots or robots.txt. Those will produce duplicate content and you really want to drive people and bots to the posts themselves. Not the index pages of the posts.
I also wouldnt worry about the sidebar. As long as you are providing a decent amount of unique content on each page you will be fine.
Hope that helps.
Site looks good!
Tom
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
-
Content relaunch without content duplication
We write great Content for blog and websites (or at least we try), especially blogs. Sometimes few of them may NOT get good responses/reach. It could be the content which is not interesting, or the title, or bad timing or even the language used. My question for the discussion is, what will you do if you find the content worth audience's attention missed it during its original launch. Is that fine to make the text and context better and relaunch it ? For example: 1. Rechristening the blog - Change Title to make it attractive
Technical SEO | | macronimous
2. Add images
3. Check spelling
4. Do necessary rewrite, spell check
5. Change the timeline by adding more recent statistics, references to recent writeups (external and internal blogs for example), change anything that seems outdated Also, change title and set rel=cannoical / 301 permanent URLs. Will the above make the blog new? Any ideas and tips to do? Basically we like to refurbish (:-)) content that didn't succeed in the past and relaunch it to try again. If we do so will there be any issues with Google bots? (I hope redirection would solve this, But still I want to make sure) Thanks,0 -
Can new content be added to a url which has a 301 redirect?
I am working on a site which is currently being redesigned. The home page currently ranks highly for relevant search terms, although on the new site the content on this page will be removed. The solution I was considering, to preserve rankings, was to move the content on the home page to a new url, and use a 301 redirect to help preserve rankings for that particular page. The question I have therefore, is am I able to add new content to the home page, and have this page freshly indexed accordingly? Any thoughts or suggestions would be most welcome. Thanks, Matt.
Technical SEO | | MatthewA0 -
Do multipe empty search result pages count as duplicate content?
I am writing an online application that among other things allows the users to search through our database for results. Pretty simply stuff. My question is this. When the site is starting out, there will probably be a lot of searches that will bring back empty pages since we will still be building it up. Each page will dynamically generate the title tags, description tags, H1, H2, H3 tags - so that part will be unique - but otherwise they will be almost identical empty results pages until then. Would Google Count all these empty result pages as duplicate content? Anybody have any experience with this? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | rayvensoft0 -
Can Not Save the SEO Settings on Attachement/Media Page
I am trying to save SEO settings to a wordpress gallery attachment page for a picture. When I fill up all info and hit save all the writing disappear from from the form. Is it a software bug or there is a solution for it??
Technical SEO | | ExpertSolutions0 -
Are aggregate sites penalised for duplicate page content?
Hi all,We're running a used car search engine (http://autouncle.dk/en/) in Denmark, Sweden and soon Germany. The site works in a conventional search engine way with a search form and pages of search results (car adverts).The nature of car searching entails that the same advert exists on a large number of different urls (because of the many different search criteria and pagination). From my understanding this is problematic because Google will penalize the site for having duplicated content. Since the order of search results is mixed, I assume SEOmoz cannot always identify almost identical pages so the problem is perhaps bigger than what SEOmoz can tell us. In your opinion, what is the best strategy to solve this? We currently use a very simple canonical solution.For the record, besides collecting car adverts AutoUncle provide a lot of value to our large user base (including valuations on all cars) . We're not just another leech adword site. In fact, we don't have a single banner.Thanks in advance!
Technical SEO | | JonasNielsen0 -
Local Search | Website Issue with Duplicate Content (97 pages)
Hi SEOmoz community. I have a unique situation where I’m evaluating a website that is trying to optimize better for local search and targeting 97 surrounding towns in his geographical location. What is unique about this situation is that he is ranking on the 1st and 2nd pages of the SERPs for his targeted keywords, has duplicate content on 97 pages to his site, and the search engines are still ranking the website. I ran the website’s url through SEOmoz’s Crawl Test Tool and it verified that it has duplicate content on 97 pages and has too many links (97) per page. Summary: Website has 97 duplicate pages representing each town, with each individual page listing and repeating all of the 97 surrounding towns, and each town is a link to a duplicate page. Question: I know eventually the site will not get indexed by the Search Engines and not sure the best way to resolve this problem – any advice?
Technical SEO | | ToddSEOBoston0 -
Is there an easier way from the server to prevent duplicate page content?
I know that using either 301 or 302 will fix the problem of duplicate page content. My question would be; is there an easier way of preventing duplicate page content when it's an issue with the URL. For example: URL: http://example.com URL: http://www.example.com My guess would be like it says here, that it's a setting issue with the server. If anyone has some pointers on how to prevent this from occurring, it would be greatly appreciated.
Technical SEO | | brianhughes2 -
Best practice: unique meta descriptions on blog 'tag' pages
Hi everyone, I'm curious, are there best practices for introducing unique meta descriptions on blog tag pages (I'm using wordpress)? For instance, using platinum seo, on an original post, the meta description is either the excerpt or a specified custom sentence. It doesn't appear that platinum seo allows for custom descriptions on tag pages. Love to hear your thoughts. Thanks! Peter
Technical SEO | | peterdbaron1