How to Fix Duplicate Descriptions
How to Fix Duplicate Descriptions Duplicate meta descriptions is an important issue that needs to be addressed as it can significantly affect your rankings in search engines.
To be clear, your meta description is not a big factor when it comes to SEO. In fact, Google announced in September of 2009 that neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords factor into Google’s ranking algorithms for web search.
So what’s the need for meta descriptions? A meta description is actually more for your users when they are in search engines. Meta descriptions are the little snippet of text that tell users what your web page is all about.
Think of it as a summary of your website that helps users decide whether you can provide the answers to their queries.
You can find duplicate meta descriptions on your website by running a Site Audit via SEMrush:
After clicking on the error “– pages have duplicate meta descriptions”, you’ll find a column where URLs that use the same description will be listed.
If you click the little down arrow icon next to the pages, you will see the URLs with the duplicate meta descriptions.
I would recommend leaving the main meta description as is. You don’t have to change that one. Just click on the additional pages with the same meta description to edit them.
In the screenshot below, you have the main URL and then two other URLs that use the same meta description:
All you need to do is click on the ones that are duplicates and Edit the Page:
Go into the page editor and optimise the meta description using whatever plugin you use for SEO such as All in One SEO or Yoast SEO:
Typically you’ll scroll down towards the bottom of the page and change the description to something else so that it’s not a duplicate.
You also don’t want your meta descriptions to be too long. This is another error that we’ll cover in another article and video.
Make sure that every page on your site has a unique description and that accurately describes the content of the page. This helps users know what your page is about before they click on it from search engines.
As I had mentioned earlier, it’s not important for ranking but it’s important for your users. Your meta description will show up in search engines before a user clicks on your website.
It’s a good opportunity to put just a little bit of text that describes your website to quickly grab a user’s attention.
Go through the list of URLs in your website that has duplicate meta description and adjust each.