Dec
14
Google duplicate content penalty for identical page titles and meta descriptions?
Filed Under Google | Comments Off
There’s been a lot of concern over this for quite a while, with the recommendation being that each page on a site should have a unique page title and meta description that relevant to that particular page. However, with what happens when they’re identical, I don’t think I’d call it a penalty, but a filter in operation.
Other than one (sometimes two slip through), when doing a site: search they’ll get filtered with what I call the “similarity filter” so you’ll see one (occasionally two) but have to click on that link they provide to see additional pages that have been excluded because they’ve been omitted for being very similar to the one shown.
I tested this on a site this summer, with pretty fast results. The web designer had run identical page titles and meta tags throughout the site, and put in a drop-down navigation list at the page top that was parsed as plain text, plus a “byline slogan” also across the entire site on the top of pages.
One page by one page, I removed the drop-down list, replaced the “motto” text with a graphic, and gave each page a unique page title and meta description.
One by one, as this was done to pages, they popped out from behind that “similar pages” link and showed up with a site: search.
It was a short term gig to fix a serious indexing issue that needed a difficult mod_rewrite solution, that was fixed, and just a few site pages were worked on by me, so there are still plenty of pages on that site that still have that similarity problem and did not, do not, and will not rank for the search terms relevant to the still_unfixed pages.
That’s all you can do is tell people what they need to do, but it’s up to them to actually do it. Way too cliche, but you can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink.
I’ve got a page up with a list of links to white papers and patents on duplicate content. One of these days I’ll go through them and condense down and write up what seem to be the more important parts.