4 websites - meta titles and descriptions
-
I manage four separate websites/brands that all focus on the same topics and have the same achitecture. I am trying to improve each site's meta title and description, page by page, that I inherited from another before me. My question is, how different should each title/description be from one another for the same page type? Do the search engines consider this heavily in their decision process of who to show on SERPs?
Am i able to simply swap out the brand name in the metas and call it done or should each meta be unique? if unique, how unique?
As you can imagine, since each page is essentially the same with the same overall content and layout targeting the same keywords, it is very difficult to rewrite metas four unique ways.
I greatly appreciate any advice on how you would approach this project.
-
The title should be pretty unique and is a huge ranking factor. It should fit to the content and (imo) to the h1 tag.
The content of the description isn't used for ranking, but makes the differnce between click or no click.
What I also saw: it is better to have no Meta Description (if the content is good enaugh) as often the same Description.
I saw many many pages ranking bad, wich fast get a bit better when I made the descriptions unique. So it may be a ranking faktor how unique the page is. Wich means everything - content, pics, titles, descriptions ... I am running a lot of tests wich take a look on that -
If you have four different sites with basically the same content, meta descriptions are not your main problem. Google does not use what is in that field for ranking purposes; the purpose of writing good, unique descriptions is to entice people to click on them. Your big problem is that four extremely similar sites means Google will see them as duplicate content and one at most will end up ranking.
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 to find Spam Website?
Hi guys, I'm seo newbie and really want to find websites that hurt seo ranking to avoid get link. Which tools or trick can help me to find those site?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | denakalami0 -
Penalty because of logo banner in sidebar of external website?
Dear mozzers, One of our pages is not ranking (well). I wrote another question about this here on Moz. I just discovered that there is an external website that has a banner to our page in the sidebar. The banner is on every 134+ pages of that site. It is in a banner slider and only show for a few seconds every now and then. The link is not "nofollow". It seems that our page dropped from Google slightly after this banner was added. However I am completely sure about this. The link is over here in the banner carousel/slider in the sidebar: http://www.wierszowisko.com/ My questions are: Could this banner log cause a penalty for our page? If so what can we do to undo this? Ask the webmaster to remove the link? Disavow on Google? How does this exactly work?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | rdudkiewicz1 -
Increase in spammy links from image gallery websites i.e. myimagecollection.net
Hi there I've recently noticed a lot of spammy links coming from image gallery sites that all look the same, i.e.: http://mypixlibrary.co/ http://hdimagegallery.net/ http://myimagecollection.net/ http://pixhder.com/ Has anyone else seen links from these? They have no contact details, not sure if they are some form of negative SEO or site spam. Any ideas how to get rid? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kerry_Jones0 -
Sometimes our meta description being displayed is not ours?
We just launched our new website a week ago (also switched to Wordpress). Yesterday I noticed that sometimes our homepage Meta Description displays something different in Google results than what we have set. I had others confirm the same result on their computers. I asked all who have been involved with marketing for company if that description was ever used for the company, as it seemed odd and worded very strange. No one has ever seen this or used this on any of our listings, social profiles etc ever. I check my meta descriptions set for home page and they were still correct. Also did a view source for cache page by Google and it showed the correct Meta Description. Still confused, I did an exact match search on the description and came up with about 30+ spam/link farm type of websites with this odd description noted by our name along with a link back to us. We never asked or paid for these. Why are they there? And how could this influence our homepage meta description? This has me very concerned that we might already be getting hacked. I see no other issues with the site. Looking for any help regarding: Why is the odd meta description showing up sometimes? Why do we have backlinks from these random sites? Is this all connected? Maybe trackbacks and pingbacks? Any help you can provide me is appreciated. Thanks! whJRuuQ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | pac-cooper0 -
Update: Copied Website
So I discovered a website the other day that is a complete duplicate of ours: justinchina.co.uk This is our website: petmedicalcenter.com . Thanks to help from Erica, I dug in deeper to see why this was happening. It seems that the justinchinca.co.uk which is hosted by GoDaddy has their A Record pointing at our web host. So that being said, our website does not seem to be hacked which is good news. Would this still cause an issue with our Google rankings? Our host, Host Monster said to contact GoDaddy and GoDaddy said that a domain owner can point their URL to anywhere that they choose. Anyway, any feedback would be helpful. Thanks for everyone thus far that has helped me. Brant
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | BCB11210 -
Website that just got hit....Need some tips or ideas...
Hey guys, The website of the company i work hit in the PR update two days ago . A little history , the site was notice by Google about spam links around 5-6 months ago .
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
Since then there is a company that cleans all the spam links and manage all the disavow process. In the last penguin update ( about two months ago ) the site jumped like crazy in the ranking and stayed there ever since... In the last three months we create less than ten links to the site, and we have focus all our work to improve
the optimization of the site.
It should be noted that the company is investing a lot in social networks and all the work in the past 3 month are White and clean... Now, two days ago in the PR update (more or less) the site just dropped , but when i say dropped , it's 200 keys that was in page 1-2 that just want out to page 5-6-7. Like the website is gone, i never see something like this... The things that pass through my head: A lot of the links the linking to the site with high PR lost their pr and now they are worthless, but still this drop ? its to extreme.
Or that Google received the disavow and just disavow a lot of links.... Does anyone have any ideas or tips on the subject ? Thank you0 -
It appears that no matter what I do, my website is not picking up traffic. What can I do?
I have tried everything, followed everything by the book...yet nothing is happening. I I yet have to try PPC, but I am sure that by now the website is healthy since I have spent from January to the current date fixing every sort of warning and errors. While I have worked on link building strategies(only submitting links to directories for the moment) However the website is dead. What should I do? Is this due to a Google penalty?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ts24group0 -
Is domain name or page title "safe" as anchor text?
I am aware of the dangers of excessively optimized anchor text I have seen some suggestions that as long as your anchor text is either the URL or the page title that this will be OK, no matter how many links come in with that anchor text. Does anyone have an opinion, or even any hard data on this? Thx Paul
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | diogenes0