What does duplicate meta description mean?
As Quick SEO fixes go, today’s problem I’ve recently fixed on my clients websites is a moderately easy fix. Duplicate meta descriptions in SEO is probably caused due to a poor setting in your SEO plugin.
All web pages whether they are a post or a page have a meta description that shows in the code of your web page. Googlebot then turns up to your website and makes a decision on what it understands your web site to be about. But ideally every page should be unique. If you want to see how Google sees your website then have a look at Googlebot test my site.
The multiple description is probably produced because your blog produces more than one category, tag or blog page. This is the most common issue in SEO checkers.
Why have a meta description?
Meta descriptions are used to help encourage clicks to your search results link. The description is found under the main title of the page or post. These give a quick description of what the content on the page is about.
These descriptions help both the people searching and the search engine crawlers understand what to expect on each page. If this meta description is duplicated it will give the impression that it not a unique article to Google. Even worse, Google can rank you poorly if it feels it getting replicated pages. .
How can I fix the duplicate meta description issue?
Assumptions made:
- Your using WordPress or a similar CMS (Content Management System)
- You have an SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) plugin installed like Yoast or All in one seo pack
- The reason you have a duplicate description is due to multiple automated pages.
Fix the duplicate meta description seo issue with Yoast
This is the easiest fix of the two. If you have a category description written out for each of your categories, and the “%%category_description%%” tag which is default in Yoast, you can get duplicate descriptions on page 2 or 3 etc of your page description as its just repeated and not unique
Lets assume that the issue is your categories are duplicate due to the fact one of your categories has more than one page of posts in it.
The default setting is probably “%%category_description%%”
So, open the Yoast plugin
Then go to Search Appearance >> Taxonomies >> categories and take out any setting for meta description
That’s it you should find it fixes your duplicate meta description issue
Obviously if the issue is a duplicate meta for tags or blog then do the exact same thing there.
Fix the no meta description issue with Yoast
I found that I still wanted to solve the issue as no meta description is now worse than duplicate. So now you can go to your categories section and add a page number snippet.
In WordPress Go to Posts >> categories >> edit snippet in Yoast area
Now add %%page%%. See screenshot below to see how the page number keeps multiple content unique and correctly rendered.
How to remove duplicate meta descriptions using WordPress without an SEO plugin
Manually visit each of the pages that have been flagged as duplicated meta descriptions and rewrite it so its encouraging a click thru and is uniquely relevant to the content on the page.