Thrudigital

In this article I’m going to explain the basic reasons for using unique title tags and unique meta description tags. As usual, I will use examples from some of my websites to demonstrate this.

In Google’s Webmaster Tools you can view various reports, including the Content Analysis report. This report provides data regarding duplicate titles, meta-descriptions and other potential problem areas. I generally ignored these reports because they never showed me too many errors, until I rented a dedicated server in the USA for my site www.aqua-fish.net. From that point on, my site was crawled much more often  (from about 40MB per day up to 550MB per day), and I suddenly began to spot a large number of errors related to duplicate title tags, meta descriptions, and short meta descriptions. Let’s quickly examine the effect this can have on your site, starting with the hardest-to-appreciate point:

1) Short meta descriptions
Short meta description tags mean that Google doesn’t consider the site’s description to be informative. This leads to the situation when this tag isn’t shown as a description within SERP. One can say that this doesn’t matter, but it can lower your page’s CTR if potential visitors aren’t clicking your link just because the description looks strange, even though it’s top-ranked. Some people have already reported that once their websites were shown with descriptions taken from DMOZ or Yahoo! Directory (this applies to Yahoo! search only, but DMOZ descriptions also apply to Google), they noticed an immediate drop in visits for certain search phrases. However, this isn’t the biggest problem:

2) Duplicate title tags
In fact this is the reason I wrote this article. I have spent hours coding and upgrading the core of aqua-fish.net while struggling with this problem. If you enter site:something.tld into Google’s search box, you should see the most important URLs from that something.tld domain in the top positions, while pages with the lowest importance should be seen last in the results. I was wondering why all top-thousand positions are pages served via show.php… I couldn’t see any pages served via index.php, with the exception of the homepage. It was clear that something was wrong, but I didn’t realise that it was directly caused by duplicate title tags and meta descriptions.

My second worry was the fact that PageRank changed for internal pages served via index.php all the time (again, except for the homepage). Some pages lost PageRank, some gained it, but then after the next PageRank update pages which were ranked in the last update lost position, and those which lost it previously, got it, in a never-ending loop… I couldn’t understand why this was happening.

After I moved the site and Google was crawling it much more often I spotted more than 2000 errors in Google Webmaster Tools. 2000+ errors is far from ideal, and certainly nothing to be proud of.

So I upgraded the core and fixed some of the problems, but I then noticed more duplicate title tags and duplicate meta tags in the reports. So, I upgraded the core once again. After a few weeks the number of duplicate title tags fell from 2000+ to only 134. This number will continue to fall as time goes by because some URLs haven’t yet been re-crawled. Eventually, of course, I hope to fix all the issues and see no errors in the reports.

So, what did this mean to my website? It’s still too early to look at the distribution of PageRank on index.php pages, or to examine changes in SERP for site:domain.tld. However, it seems that this upgrade was good in terms of telling Google which URLs do exist and which are no more. Traffic from googlebot fell from 0.5 requests per second to 0.2 requests per second, and organic traffic (from Google) increased by another 800-1000 visits per day.

If you’re experiencing problems with duplicate title tags and duplicate meta description tags, follow these steps:

1. Different URLs have the same titles or meta description tags, and each of these URLs does contain unique content:
Modify these tags manually. If your website is dynamic, you may have to create new functions. If it’s static, then you will have to manually edit each page’s HTML.

2. Same content is shown on more than one page (this usually applies to URLs with parameters):
This is what happened to me. For example, index.php?a=1&b=2 is the same like index.php?b=2&a=1, but for search engines these are two different documents, but with exactly the same content. I recommend you set-up a function that will handle all “invalid” URLs and will use a 301 redirect to direct them to “valid” URLs. Realistically, this is the only solution. You could make non-existing “invalid” pages, thus handling them as 404 pages, but you may also lose potential links, and wouldn’t actually solve the problem as a whole. If you’re not using parameters, but somehow more than one URL points to the same document, you should always choose between the “valid” and the “invalid” ones.

Sometimes spammers (or competitors) link to pages such as “…index.php?…” in order to confuse search engines and damage your website’s rankings! You know that out of two URLs (or more if parameters are proceeded to other URLs) containing the same content, one page must be considered primary. The second often looks like spam. The more spam-like pages, the worse the rankings of your website in Google will be! Fortunately, you can follow reports in Google Webmaster Tools, and it’s easy to redirect invalid URLs to their correct forms. This way, spammers or competitors don’t have the opportunity to damage your website’s rankings.

I now know that if I want more organic traffic from Google, I have to do my best not only in terms of link- and content-building, but also in terms of making both web pages and URLs unique.

(Just a note to readers: I decided to categorise this article as both “SEO” and “Programming”, as it’s related to programming if one wants to change the core.)

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