Duplicate Meta Descriptions
Duplicate meta descriptions for multiple URLs on your website can reduce traffic from search engines. Learn More
- Because meta descriptions are often used in the context snippets that appear in search results, duplicate or vague descriptions in your HTML headers may lead to low click-throughs to your site. This may, in turn, diminish your ranking in search results.
- Search engines may use the meta descriptions in the HTML headers of your pages to better index search results. Because duplicate meta descriptions can lead to improper indexing of your site’s pages, it is important to differentiate between the content of each unique URL by accurately describing the page content in the meta description.
Recommendations
Give each page of your website a meta description reflects the content of that page.
- Users are more likely to click through to your pages when the context snippet in search results is relevant to their search query. If there is no context snippet, or if it is vague, the resulting lower click-through rate may lead to diminished ranking of your site’s pages.
- When creating unique and accurate meta descriptions, take care not to replicate too closely any of the page title. Because the title of the page is likely to be the title of the search result, you should take advantage of the description to further describe the content of your page to searchers.
- The meta description should appear in the <head> section of each html page:
<html>
<head>
<meta name=”description” content=”Put a description of your page here.“>
</head>
<body>
Your page content here.
</body>
</html>