Search Engine Optimisation – Duplicate titles and Meta Descriptions

It is absolutely vital to the long term success of a website to be able to specify unique title tags and Meta description tags on every page of a website (or if not every single page, then at least the ones that you are trying to drive visitors towards).

This is something that is mentioned in our site reviews for prospects and new customers alike, as well as being something that we frequently have to remind clients about.

A lot of CMS systems that I have used frequently “inherit” meta and title data from the parent page – so whole sections of a website can contain the same information here – it’s usually something that is easily changed, but you have to change from default settings.

Other situations where this can be a problem often include shopping carts – these all vary in how Meta data is applied, but a lot of shopping cart driven websites have no mechanism to specify unique data for each page. Often, you will specify a title and description tag for a shopping cart driven website sitewide for exactly the same data on each page. Sometimes this is slightly cleverer, and although you only specify a unique title and description, it will often mention what a page is about, so a title tag may start “About xxx – title tag from rest of site here”.

This is slightly better than not being able to control these pages, as you wont be marked down for duplicate data in these areas on multiple pages, but being able to control these fully can allow for much more targeted optimisation, rather than attempting to specify a catch all.

Frequently with shopping carts, its possible to do the product pages data – but we often find that the content pages with a good chance of achieving a ranking with competitive phrases rather than the more specific products if you are in full control of all the important factors.

Having duplicate data in these fields without a doubt impacts on your search engine optimisation results. These tags are essentially telling the search engines what to expect when they visit that page – and by having the same data for multiple pages, you are telling them to expect the same content on all of those pages. This reduces the chances of any of those pages ranking to its full potential.

It is possible to achieve rankings in these situations, but it normally restricts you from being able to achieve the very highest positions on competitive phrases, especially if your competition is able to control some of these elements that you may not be able to.

One of my clients made an inadvertant change to a number of pages on their website which left 20-30 pages that had previously been very specifically targeted to unique phrases, which meant that these pages were devalued as soon as they were crawled again. The impact that this had on the Google UK rankings for the site was immense – we track the number of top 30 rankings in Google for this client, and in the space of a week, this went from 30 top 30 rankings in Google UK to 15. This is because each of these targeted pages lost their rankings, because the search engines began to expect the same content on each of those pages.

There is a warning section in Google Webmaster Tools that brings to your attention any issues that your site may have with duplicate titles and Meta descriptions – if you think that you could be being held back by this problem, ensure your site is verified with these tools and review the issues that are highlighted there. If you resolve these issues, it’s likely to improve the results for the whole site, and particularly those pages.