Today’s question comes
from the Netherlands. Walter wants to ask, is it
necessary for each single page within my website to have a
unique metatag description? Great question. OK, so the way I
would think of it is, you can either have a
unique metatag description, or you can choose to have
no metatag description. But I wouldn’t have duplicate
metatag description. In fact, if you register
and verify your site in our free Google
Webmaster Tools console, we will tell you if we see
duplicate meta descriptions. So that is something
that I would avoid. In general, it’s
probably, maybe not worth your time to come
up with a unique meta description for every
single page on your site. Like when I blog, I
don’t bother to do that. Don’t tell anybody. Oops, I told everybody. But if there are some pages
that really matter, like they’re your home page or pages that
have really important return on investment, you know,
your most featured products or something like that, or maybe
you’ve looked at the search results, and there’s a
few pages on your site that just have really bad
automatically generated snippets. We try to do our
best, but we wouldn’t claim that we have perfect
snippets all of the time. In those kinds of
situations, then it might make sense to
go in and make sure that you have a unique,
handcrafted, lovingly made, metatag description. But in general, rather than
have one metatag description repeated over and
over and over again for every page on your site,
I would either go ahead and make sure that there is a
unique one for the pages that really matter. Or just leave it
off, and Google will generate the snippet for you. But I wouldn’t have
the duplicate ones if you can help it.
18 Comments
Patrick LaJuett
Some content management systems will insert global meta descriptions. I use Google Webmaster Tools: Search Appearance > HTML Improvements > Duplicate meta descriptions to identify any issues. Nifty little tool.
#googlewebmastertools #seotips #metatags
Carrie Hemphill
I wish all website platform providers followed this advice.
Sameer Kohli
Interesting
Subhash Jain
It can save the time. But can Google create what we intend to create from #SEO point of view?
Andrew Maynes
Is this just answering a different question? Is the meta description tag still used?
Kenneth von Rauch
I believe Yoast should add a feature to his plugin that checks if a specific meta description is duplicated or not. Perhaps, it's already available. Anybody in the know?
WSI Connect
According to @Matt Cutts no meta description is better that duplicate meta descriptions.
Aldrick Ona
can somebody tell me, what kinds of duplicate meta descriptions ?
give me a sample please, i still a little bit confuse 🙁
Federico Vitiello
New from @Google Don't bother with Meta Description unless it's an important page for conversion and such. Better leave it blank than have it duplicate across the website. Good to know. Time saved 🙂 #ftl #u
SEO Tips
Hope that helps.
Derek Palizay
Great advice. Just found your channel from a friend on Twitter. Subscribed and will be watching/studying with you from now on! Thanks!
aaisom
Thanks for making this video direct and to the point.
Green Apple
i stopped using meta desc long time ago. i feel it's limiting and a waste of time.
Hans Landa
Since we set the meta-description for one of our websites manually for each and every page, we observe the click-through rate declining. I think it's best to leave it up to Google to take care of it.
Christy Han
Thanks for this video…!!!
I've got the answer now 🙂
Iroquois Pliskin
How about telling us the impact of duplicate meta tags description on SEO?
Ananta Shree
How to handle generic header?
Like if we have a single header and we called it on every single page, how google will handle the request..
Thanks in advance!
Ananta
App Marketing
Tell the way that we put description for every pages in the website. thanks
Deniz Akerman
Hello!
Are these metadatas considered duplicate?
" Brown and Green Abstract Painting from X. Order original paintings directly from artist."
" Yellow and Black Abstract Painting from X. Order original paintings directly from artist."
Writing unique metadatas for each item could be daunting and irrelevant.