Duplicate Meta Descriptions

Matt Cutts Senior Spam Engineer at Google, this week posted a video about duplicate meta descriptions. We see a lot of sites with duplicate meta descriptions and usually they are a sign of a much bigger problem of duplicate content or content getting crawled at addresses it shouldn’t be. If you have lots of duplicate meta descriptions it will have an effect on your ranking.

Meta Descriptions & SEO

Years ago we used to optimise meta descriptions by getting a key phrase early in the field. Over the years though, we found it had less of an effect. What we do know now though is that it can have a negative effect if a lot of your pages have the same meta description.

Should You Use Meta Descriptions?

The short answer is yes. Having said that though I typically do not use them for blog posts, I let Google replace the description in the SERPs with a snippet off the page. Matt Cutts though, has told us it is a good idea to use them with important pages (read target pages) which to me, indicates they do have some SEO juice still. I’ll be running some tests to see what positive effect they still may have on a page’s ranking.

If you have a large product catalogue you should use them on your product pages especially if the pages themselves are low on content. The more unique information you can provide the user and Google about your content the better.

Get Rid of Duplicate Meta Descriptions

In Google webmaster tools, go to the Search Appearance menu and select HTML Improvements.

If you find you have something like the client below, you really should fix it. For this business owner we will be removing the meta descriptions entirely and let Google use it’s own snippet. If you have a massive problem like that one, removing them completely is probably the quickest fix.

Here is Matt’s video.