Duplicate meta descriptions
-
Hi All
Does having quite a few Duplicate meta descriptions hurt SEO. I am worried that I have too many and thinking this could be the reason for my recent drop in search visibility.
Thanks in Advance.
Andy
-
thanks for your responses and clearing this up.
-
Thanks Kevin!
-
Donna--Good point. I revised my previous answer to include that meta descriptions as a display factor that could influence ctr's but not rankings. Meta KW/Descriptions do not influence rankings--instead can help to increase click through's. By including a good unique one increases chances that Google will use it and, more times than not, will have a higher ctr than the auto generated one if the meta description is not included. Great clarification.
-
Hi Andy,
Assuming you mean rankings when you say visibility, having too many meta descriptions won't have any effect because Google doesn't take them into account when ranking web pages.
That said, I've found when there are multiple meta description tags on a page, Google tends to use the first one it encounters. When there are none, it selects when it deems to be relevant from the page and displays that.
Studies have shown that using your primary keyword phrase and being different or helpful in your meta description helps increase click-thru rates. Inclusion of your primary keyword phrase reinforces the relevance of the search result and makes the search result stand out (because search terms are highlighted in bold). Being different or helpful gives the searcher what he or she wants - the solution to a problem or to be entertained.
-
As you probably know, all meta descriptions should be unique. Will a couple hurt? probably not but I advise against it as a display factor. Furthermore, some people will actually eliminate any duplicates meta descriptions and let Google auto-create one. Please see Matt Cutt's video on the topic.
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
-
How much is the importance of grammar and formation of sentence in Meta Title and Description in SEO
We are having, say around 100 products, cakes to be specific, with different flavors, available in more than 100000 areas of 200 plus cities. Now to make it SEO friendly, we have an algorithm which creates a unique page for each cake name, with area name, and few keywords, so that if customer is searching for cake delivery in any specific area of specific city, the user will easily find the right page. Now the thing is - when creating such unique pages for different combinations of cake, city and areas, it is also creating some content. So we wanted to know how much is the importance given to Grammatically correct statement compared to incorrect statement in ranking a page. for example: there is 1Kg Chocolate Cake, available in Satellite Area of Ahmedabad city, which one of the following Page title will have higher ranking? Case A: Send 1Kg chocolate cake to satellite area ahmedabad online Case B: Online 1kg Chocolate Cake delivery in Satellite Ahmedabad In Case A: the statement contains all keywords, but there are some grammatical mistakes in formation of statement as well as Capital Characters are not used for Satellite (Area name) and Ahmedabad (City name) In Case B: the statement is grammatical proper, as well as capital characters are used for Area name and City name. Does all search engine also have their algorithm designed to analyze the grammatical structure of page title or it just scans the keywords? Thanks in advance. Team Midnightcake
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | midnightcake1 -
Duplicate title tags due to lightbox use
I am looking at a site and am pulling up duplicate title tags because of their lightbox use so... So they have a page: http://www.website.com/page and then a duplicate of that page: http://www.website.com/page?width=500&height=600 on a huge number of pages (using Drupal)... that kind of thing - what would be the best / cleanest solution?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Woocommerce SEO & Duplicate content?
Hi Moz fellows, I'm new to Woocommerce and couldn't find help on Google about certain SEO-related things. All my past projects were simple 5 pages websites + a blog, so I would just no-index categories, tags and archives to eliminate duplicate content errors. But with Woocommerce Product categories and tags, I've noticed that many e-Commerce websites with a high domain authority actually rank for certain keywords just by having their category/tags indexed. For example keyword 'hippie clothes' = etsy.com/category/hippie-clothes (fictional example) The problem is that if I have 100 products and 10 categories & tags on my site it creates THOUSANDS of duplicate content errors, but If I 'non index' categories and tags they will never rank well once my domain authority rises... Anyone has experience/comments about this? I use SEO by Yoast plugin. Your help is greatly appreciated! Thank you in advance. -Marc
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | marcandre1 -
Duplicate content within sections of a page but not full page duplicate content
Hi, I am working on a website redesign and the client offers several services and within those services some elements of the services crossover with one another. For example, they offer a service called Modelling and when you click onto that page several elements that build up that service are featured, so in this case 'mentoring'. Now mentoring is common to other services therefore will feature on other service pages. The page will feature a mixture of unique content to that service and small sections of duplicate content and I'm not sure how to treat this. One thing we have come up with is take the user through to a unique page to host all the content however some features do not warrant a page being created for this. Another idea is to have the feature pop up with inline content. Any thoughts/experience on this would be much appreciated.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | J_Sinclair0 -
Duplicate on page content - Product descriptions - Should I Meta NOINDEX?
Hi, Our e-commerce store has a lot of product descriptions duplicated - Some of them are default manufacturer descriptions, some are descriptions because the colour of the product varies - so essentially the same product, just different colour. It is going to take a lot of man hours to get the unique content in place - would a Meta No INDEX on the dupe pages be ok for the moment and then I can lift that once we have unique content in place? I can't 301 or canonicalize these pages, as they are actually individual products in their own right, just dupe descriptions. Thanks, Ben
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bjs20101 -
How to Fix Duplicate Page Content?
Our latest SEOmoz crawl reports 1138 instances of "duplicate page content." I have long been aware that our duplicate page content is likely a major reason Google has de-valued our Web store. Our duplicate page content is the result of the following: 1. We sell audio books and use the publisher's description (narrative) of the title. Google is likely recognizing the publisher as the owner / author of the description and our description as duplicate content. 2. Many audio book titles are published in more than one format (abridged, unabridged CD, and/or unabridged MP3) by the same publisher so the basic description on our site would be the same at our Web store for each format = more duplicate content at our Web store. Here's are two examples (one abridged, one unabridged) of one title at our Web store. Kill Shot - abridged Kill Shot - unabridged How much would the body content of one of the above pages have to change so that a SEOmoz crawl does NOT say the content is duplicate?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | lbohen0 -
Duplicate content for swatches
My site is showing a lot of duplicate content on SEOmoz. I have discovered it is because the site has a lot of swatches (colors for laminate) within iframes. Those iframes have all the same content except for the actual swatch image and the title of the swatch. For example, these are two of the links that are showing up with duplicate content: http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=3691&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= http://www.formica.com/en/home/dna.aspx?color=204&std=1&prl=PRL_LAMINATE&mc=0&sp=0&ots=&fns=&grs= I do want each individual swatch to show up in search results and they currently are if you search for the exact swatch name. Is the fact that they all have duplicate content affecting my individual rankings and my domain authority? What can I do about it? I can't really afford to put unique content on each swatch page so is there another way to get around it? Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | AlightAnalytics0 -
Diagnosing duplicate content issues
We recently made some updates to our site, one of which involved launching a bunch of new pages. Shortly afterwards we saw a significant drop in organic traffic. Some of the new pages list similar content as previously existed on our site, but in different orders. So our question is, what's the best way to diagnose whether this was the cause of our ranking drop? My current thought is to block the new directories via robots.txt for a couple days and see if traffic improves. Is this a good approach? Any other suggestions?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jamesti0