SEO Duplicate Metas

Do you have duplicate descriptions?

You’ve written your articles, you’ve published your articles, you’ve gathered some influx of traffic. So, what’s stopping you from more?

In order to attract traffic you need to take special care of meta description tags

It’s high time we started discussing duplicate meta tags.

Duplicate meta tags are a very bad thing, but don’t worry about it, but they are actually really common.

Meta description tags are HTML attributes which provide a concise explanations of the content of your articles/web pages. They are commonly used on search engine result pages in order to display preview snippets for a given page.

Example (HTML):

<head>
 <meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description. You'll see this in search engine results.">
 </head>

They are a good way to offer the users a concise, relevant and appealing summary of each page’s content, so that you can directly influence click-behavior.

What are duplicate descriptions?

Duplicate content exists when two (or more) pages use the same content: TITLE tags, META DESCRIPTION tags. This brings about a problem of confusion for users, because they will find on search engines two (or more) URLs that land on the same content.

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Why unique meta descriptions are important

Duplicate descriptions can cause a lot of trouble for users. They aren’t helpful when individual pages appear in the same web results. So, you need to differentiate the descriptions for different pages. This will make your content more easily found, and it will increase your traffic.

How to avoid duplicate descriptions

One way to combat duplicate meta descriptions is to create a dynamic and programmatic way to make them unique. You can do this in several ways:

Include specific and clear facts in the description. You can include structured information about the page. You should also make the information relevant. At the same time make it sound interesting and appealing.
Make accurate and unique descriptions, by programmatically generating them.
Make quality descriptions. A good meta description is truly descriptive, because they can improve the quantity and quality of your search traffic.

How to fix duplicate meta tags

Use ContentLook to identify the pages with duplicates inside of your website. ContentLook will display you a list of pages that have problems. This way you can use the report provided and easily fix them.
The pages could have problems with duplicate: Titles, Meta Description, Facebook and Twitter Cards.
If you have Duplicate Titles or Meta Descriptions, what happens to you in search engine results is painful, as Google penalizes you, because it’s not fair-play, because you can just have a website with the same piece of content appearing over and over again, just trying to index it better on search engines. The problem is people will reach that website only to see that the content is the same all the time, which is very frustrating for a human being. If you correct this, your traffic will soar through the roof.
Fix the HTML code inside of each section.
With regard to Twitter Cards and Facebook Opengraph, you won’t be penalized by search engines, but it will cause an error which will stop displaying the Twitter Cards or Facebook Opengraph information, if you don’t correct duplicates.

Fix duplicate meta tags with Squirrly

If you have a WordPress site, it’s even easier.

You can now use Squirrly’s SEO Settings to fix this.

It’s an easy and fast way to do it.

Go to your WordPress Dashboard -> Squirrly tab -> Settings. Switch from Beginner to Advanced. Go to the page you want to correct, click Edit and use the Snippet from Squirrly -> Customize.

You’re now able to make the description unique.