Ask Kalena

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Hi Kalena,

I just noticed that my company’s homepage has five meta description tags within the head tag. Will this have any negative ramifications? Thank you,

Heather

Hi Heather,

The Meta Description Tag in itself is not likely to have a significant effect on your rankings one way or another, but it is still important because more often than not, the snippet displayed in Google search results is taken from the description tag.

Using a description tag therefore gives you some control over the “message” you are providing to searchers about what your page is about.

Having multiple description tags on the same page, will not provide any SEO benefit – only the first one will be considered – the rest will probably be ignored. However, there is a chance that search engines could consider multiple tags as “spammy”.

There is NO good reason to have multiple description tags on your site – at best it is proof of lazy coding, which increases the size of you page and slows down page load times – at worst it could be considered spamming and may result in search penalties.
What about Keyword and Robots?

Using multiple Keyword and Robot Meta Tags are also probably not a good idea. Google will aggregate the content for multiple Robots tags (but don’t advise using more than one). It is not clear how multiple keyword tags are treated – but these days their use is mostly irrelevant anyway.
Duplicate Descriptions?

While we are talking about Description Tags… You should also try not to have “duplicate” description tags – i.e. multiple pages with the same description tag.

The fact that Google webmaster tools goes to the trouble to flag duplicate descriptions as a “warning”, should provide an indication that Google doesn’t think this is a good idea either. Description tags should be unique, and provide a succinct (and keyword rich) description of the content of the page.

Andy Henderson
Ireckon Web Marketing

Dear Kalena…

You’ve helped us out with a couple of problems over the years ~ thanks again. Don’t have a problem this time but I do want to get your opinion/guidance so I can maybe AVOID a problem.

We handle over 5,000 products, and we want to create a page for each product using an automated page generator. Same as what thousands of other people do. Nothing fancy and no SEO tricks. Just a brief description of the item, price & how to order.

I’ll be using a template, of course, and about 75% of the words (excluding shared borders) will be common to all pages. The other 25% of words on a given page will be unique to the product/page in question.

I may be overly cautious, but I’ve learned the hard way that what seems like a good idea or what the rest of the herd is doing might not be acceptable to the SE’s, especially if not executed properly. We have a fairly well-performing website and the stakes get higher as we grow. So, any tips on what to do / not do when creating these individual product page would be appreciated.

Thanks
Rick

Dear Rick,

Sometimes it’s possible to reduce duplicate content by placing that content in a dedicated section of your website and then linking to it where necessary (this can apply to things like shipping/handling, product guarantees, returns policies and terms & conditions… which some store owners will try and display on every page but could quit easily be put elsewhere).

Another way to make the search engines focus on the unique content is by using emphasis tags (such as H1, H2, bold, italics etc.) and use them sparingly (or don’t use them at all) in your page header, footer and other duplicate parts of the page. This will help the spiders isolate your unique page-specific content as well as drawing your readers attention to the most important parts of the page.

You could also try and setup a feature that allows users to add reviews or feedback on each of the products. This user-generated content would become yet another source of additional unique content for each page (and what’s better is you didn’t have to write it yourself).

Hope this helps!

Peter Newsome
SiteMost SEO Brisbane

Hi Kalena

Quick question.

One of the lessons in your SEO201 course says that if you run PPC campaigns and use landing pages for these campaigns that are similar in layout and content, you should prevent search engines robots from indexing them. Please explain why?

In my thoughts, the more files the search engines index the more exposure you may get.

Thanks
Alex

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Hi Alex

PPC landing pages can often look nearly identical and the only difference between them is the target keywords used. Web pages that look too similar are sometimes filtered out of the search results as duplicate content. Too much duplicate content on a domain may impact it’s ability to rank highly, therefore I always recommend preventing robots from indexing landing pages, using your robots.txt file.

If you are using existing pages on your site as PPC landing pages and they aren’t too similar to each other, there is no need to block robots from indexing them. Make sense?

Dear Kalena…

Does Google automatically search sub-directories? Or do I have to have a ‘Links’ page to force google to index the sub-directories?

Also, I was reading about ‘redundant’ content. I have a business directory which will eventually have thousands of pages with the only main difference in content being: {Company} {City} {ST} and {Subject1}. Will Google view this as redundant content?

Best Regards,

Steve

Dear Steve,

For Google to index your sub-directories, you will need some links pointing to them. These links can simply be internal navigation links and if you have a large website, it’s also advisable to include a sitemap that links to all your pages and sub-directories within your site.

In regards to your redundant content query – it’s best SEO practice to have at least 250 words of unique content per page. So if all the pages are the same other than the contact details – then yes, it would be considered redundant content.

My advice would be to offer a one-page listing for each company and on that page have a small blurb about the company, their contact details and a feature that allow users to add feedback/comments/reviews. This should provide enough information for Google to index without causing redundant or duplicate content issues.

Hope this helps!

Peter Newsome
SiteMost

Hi Kalena

I was wondering if you would be able to give me some insight on a question that I have. I am working on launching a spanish version of my company’s website. It’s a mirror of our current site where when a user goes in should they select Spanish they can view the pages in Spanish.

Will this pose a problem to SEO if the pages remain the same name?  Our hosting company has created a new folder where the spanish files sit, and the structure mirrors the English version of the site.   If the spanish version of the website is set up this way, will the search engines consider these duplicate pages?

Thank you,
Heather

Hi Heather

If the mirror pages are in Spanish, then they are not duplicates and won’t be treated as such. Smile! You have nothing to worry about.