Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I've often removed urls from the supplemental index by getting unique meta descriptions in place instead of universal ones. And if you can get a modification for your CMS to allow unique meta descriptiosn, that would be the best. Otherwise, you can at least remove that "universal" meta description. Every page in a website is not likely to be about the exact same thing.
The problem with using no meta description at all is that Google may well grab the first few lines of your source code for the same purpose. Unless you are using "source ordered content" to lift each page's unique content to the top of the source code, Google's algo may well grab the top menu for its assessment -- and you'll still be sending a duplicate signal.
[edited by: tedster at 10:12 pm (utc) on July 8, 2007]
On the same subject, I have managed to get my forum installation to produce a unique meta description for each topic. However, if there are several pages to that topic, the title and description are the same for each topic page (but differ between topics).
What are your thoughts on this?
eg "How to cook fried eggs - Page Two"
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 10:52 pm (utc) on July 8, 2007]
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 11:27 pm (utc) on July 8, 2007]
matches the page's main <p> description?
If you mean taking the first text that appears in a <p> tag (not an H1 tag), I've done that. It does give a unique description and seems not to create problems right now. I would prefer that to doubling up on the Title element.
I'd worked so hard to get the software to produce metas for the topics
As long as that main topic meta description is not repeated on the individual pages, you have taken a step forward. But I'll bet there's some very useful content for search on those individual pages -- so I'd look for a way to get that modification done too. Definitely don't repeat the meta description Right now, it can definitely hurt and it certainly does not help.
(Titles still the same for each page of the topic)
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 1:50 am (utc) on July 9, 2007]
The most is to have a description on every page that actually describes the content of that specific page.
Every page of the article also needs a direct link back to page one of the article - for users who arrive on a random page to easily be able start at the beginning.
[edited by: Asia_Expat at 11:04 pm (utc) on July 9, 2007]
Personally, I wouldn't risk it.
Tell me, what would the likely effect be of a description meta tag that was just blank?
Funny, I just told a coder definitely not to do that. A client is launching a new site and is in a hurry, so I suggested leaving out the meta descriptions that aren't unique for now... but cautioned against the blank tag. Somehow, that felt to be the worst of all worlds... like, they're all the same and there's nothing there at all.
what is uniqueness? is it unique if you have 1000 site s with widgets
and the description is
buy and selling widgets 1
buy and selling widgets 2
buy and selling widgets 3 and so on or is this to similarly.
or how diffrently has to bee the description.
For the record, My forum has around 5000 topics, all of which are indexed, around 300 of which are not supplemental.
I have completely eliminated duplicate content. No URL rewriting has been employed and I went with the dynamic URL's out of the box.
Do you have any Experience,or anybody else with short discription ,what would happen
if i shorten the discription from
sell and buy blue widgets to blue widgets the same with
green widgets ,red widgets
an so on with 1000 sites
is this Enough
if i shorten the discription from sell and buy blue widgets to blue widgets...
This is the meta description element we're talking about, not the title. It's generally agreed that the description isn't used by the engines for ranking purposes. It can, though, be a useful marketing tool for you, if you use it properly.
The meta description is where Google looks first to create the description "snippet" that appears below your page title in the serps. It should be attractive to users, to prompt them to visit your site.
This snippet is query specific. If Google doesn't find text that matches a query in the description you offer, it will look elsewhere on your page, and then may look off your page.
After the meta description, it starts looking at the top of the html text in your page's source code, continues down that code, and then (unless you use the "noodp" attribute in your robots meta tag), will look at descriptions of your site that appear elsewhere on the web, with Open Directory, I believe, being the first alternative considered.
See Google's Webmaster Central article on titles and descriptions. [google.com]
It's up to you to tune the description so it satisfies a broad range of queries for which the page is likely to rank, and which also prompts click-throughs.
In the case of your "blue widgets" example, those two words by themselves don't offer a very broad range of possibilities for matching. Suppose someone searches for "big blue widgets." Would you prefer that they see a well-crafted description that prompts them to visit your site, or would you be satisfied that they see, say, nav menu text that happens to be at the beginning of your source code?
blue widgets
I'm not sure that Google would return a description this short in any event. In a few test searches, the shortest description I could come up with was about 56 characters. This may be because no one used merely a two-word description. Generally, Google returns about 150 characters, or breaks sooner at sentence breaks.
