Google search console claims duplicated meta description, but not duplicated

[Sergio Longhi]

Google search console is telling me that there are some Duplicated meta description in all my e-commerce categories pages.
I checked and this seems not true, can you tell me what is going on please?

These are two of the page supposedly wrong :

https://www.example.com/en/bio-health.html
https://www.example.com/bio-health.html

As you can easily see, meta description are different :

EN:

<meta name="description" content="Here you can find the best supplements from Bio Health, protein, sport supplements, aminoacids, bars, gainers, creatine. All the supplements with discount applied, Muscletech, Bsn, Gaspari, Optimum Nutrition, Universal Nutrition, Ultimate Nutrition. Visit our catalog." />

IT:

<meta name="description" content="Qui trovi le migliori marche di Bio Health proteine, integratori alimentari, aminoacidi ramificati, barrette, gainer, preworkout. Le trovi tutte in sconto, Muscletech, Bsn, Gaspari, Optimum Nutrition, Universal Nutrition, Ultimate Nutrition. Guarda subito il nostro catalogo." />

Language is different, meta description are different, hreflang is present.

[edited by: goodroi at 1:02 pm (utc) on Dec 20, 2016]
[edit reason] Please no specifics as per forum charter [/edit]

[lucy24]

These are two of the page supposedly wrong :

https://www.example.com/en/bio-health.html
https://www.example.com/bio-health.html

Is this an artifact of post editing, or an error in the site design and/or navigation? (Missing /it/ element)

Reminder: Half of what GSC tells you can safely be ignored. Take a quick look to make sure you haven't really done something wrong, and then go about your business.

[Sergio Longhi]

Hi Lucy24,

not sure what you mean by artifact or editing, but the html source can be checked on the pages, I gave the link. It's exactly how I described.

Points are:

1) Ok, it's a GSC mistake, now, will Google do the same mistake when considering my website?

2) Semrush found some other mistakes, I believe wrong too, what can be a valid tool to eventually check issues?


Thank you for your time.

[not2easy]

Hi Sergio and Welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

I believe that lucy24 might have been referring to the absence of an equivalent "/it/" directory due to the structure of "/en/" in one URL and no directory in the version in Italian. This gives the appearance that the site is intended for visitors from Italy but also accommodates English language visitors in the /en/ directory.

In case you had not noticed, the link you posted was replaced with "example.com" to comply with forum rules which caused the question about whether the /it/ directory had been edited out. Site reviews and personal help with a specific site are only available in the paid forums. Out here we discuss principles but not specifics. I hope this helps.

[Sergio Longhi]

My bad, now it's more then clear, I din't know there is a paid forum section too, I'll check it out, very interesting.

Yes, "/it/" it's omitted because the website it's by default in Italian, thx.

[keyplyr]

Since Google needs to translate in order to compare the content of the meta description tags & is often poor at these translations, my suggestion would be to make sure they are explicitly different.

Get these tags so GSC does not show this warning. Rearrange the wording or choose a completly different description. Submit the pages for reindex using the Fetch As Googlebot tool.

These are fairly important tags since Google uses the meta description as first choice for the site snippet on the SERP (search engine results page.) If Google sees a conflict, it could result in missing description under your site in the SERP. Bedsides the page title, this is the only other way you have to control what displays there.

[Sergio Longhi]

Very good advice keyplyr, I will try some change, may be the Google algorithm calculate and say "duplicated" if see 70-80% similar.

[Robert Charlton]

Actually, a bunch of potential issues here... and, as lucy24 says, they may or may not make a difference.

Translations aren't dupe content...

Since Google needs to translate in order to compare the content of the meta description tags & is often poor at these translations, my suggestion would be to make sure they are explicitly different.

The different language versions of translated content should not be seen as duplicate, so the underlying content should not affect Google's assessment of what content is duplicated.

Not all of the vocabulary, though, is translated...
The issue here might be, though, that many of the product brand names don't get translated.... they remain the same in different language versions of the page... and thus Google might be seeing them as duplicate vocabulary. (Is it possible also that these same product names appear in descriptions of pages in other product categories?)

How the brand names are seen...
Also... several of the brand names use generic English words that can't be trademarked, which might affect whether Google sees these names as entities, or simply as ordinary English language vocabulary. (I'm trying to avoid repeating the specifics here, but you can look in the example descriptions and check them further).

This ^^^ gets us into a really murky area... and I'm only conjecturing that trademark/ entity status might make a difference in how Google treats the words... but the untranslated product names, IMO, are likely a strong factor in any event.

Google and mixed languages...
Also... Google has also historically had problems in dealing with mixed languages, and the last time I checked (which was quite a while back) the official recommendation was to avoid more than one language on a page. So, it's possible that the use of English on multiple pages of foreign language content can create issues. While technically the meta description element is not "onpage" content, there are conceivably related issues.

Here's a thread from six years ago which is among the most thorough we've had on mixed language issues, pertaining specifically to how Google Translate sees a page (which often relates to how Google ranks the page). Though it goes very far back and Google has made many refinements, I don't know whether the mixed language issues have been resolved... nor do I know whether there are mixed language issues affecting Sergio's site....

Translate problem in Google SERP - not always ranking right language
July - Oct 2010
https://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4169769.htm
[webmasterworld.com]

Google and duplicate descriptions...
I should add that over the years, Google has been all over the map about how much duplication in descriptions can affect page performance... and I've seen it go from...
- "duplicate descriptions make no difference" to...
- "duplicate descriptions only make a difference if your pages are extremely similar" to...
- "if you can't create unique descriptions, you're better off omitting the descriptions and allowing Google's snippet team to create them for you".

Much as I agree with keyplyr about the meta description "as first choice for the site snippet on the SERP", if these descriptions identified as duplicates do cause problems, it might be interesting to omit several in a product area to see what the Google snippets team comes up with. The quality of the snippets you get will then depend on the quality of the writing on your page, which is where Google would likely go next. They'd start looking for a relevant description at the top of the page and then work their way down. I very much doubt that Google would auto-translate a description from another language.

[Sergio Longhi]

Thank you for the analysis, I can't even call it an answer, I need to call it for what it is.
I removed the brand names in the meta description, I will see in a few days if Google digested the thing or not.
I specifically don't have any mixed languages, every language have a directory, this to avoid conflicts with urls.

Now let's see what happens next, believe that more then this it can't be done.

[lucy24]

Google uses the meta description as first choice for the site snippet on the SERP

My impression is that it's their second choice. First choice is a sentence containing all search terms; only if the words are widely separated on the page does Google fall back on the meta description.

[Robert Charlton]

Sergio, thanks. Please keep us posted on how this turns out, as we don't often get feedback on this type of issue.

Regarding mixed languages...

I specifically don't have any mixed languages, every language have a directory, this to avoid conflicts with urls.

Well, yes and no.... You're obviously very aware of the issues, and you stated most of the key points in your opening post.

Because many of the brand names, though, are in generic English, there is potential that this will create a mixed language situation. I think you're correct that there is a threshold, but these days the statistical weighting may be more complicated than just a simple percentage. Factors may vary depending on, say, whether the term or terms relate to your core targeting, source of inbound linking, etc. It's likely that you may be specifically targeting some of these products in English on foreign language pages, and that might be a problem.

[keyplyr]

My impression is that it's their second choice. First choice is a sentence containing all search terms; only if the words are widely separated on the page does Google fall back on the meta description

Only if those keywords were included in the search query. Otherwise, without any other impacting indicators, it's your meta description that is 1st choice for SERP snippet.

[Sergio Longhi]

Robert

Please keep us posted on how this turns out, as we don't often get feedback on this type of issue.

Of course I will do, I discovered another "issue" and I'm trying to salve it, this time I'm 100% sure that pages don't have Pages duplicate title tags, but Google is telling me :

Pages with duplicate title tags:

Supplements Brand AAA
Supplements Brand BBB
Supplements Brand CCC
Supplements Brand DDD
..................
Supplements Brand ZZZ

So, I have all this list of brands (100) with similar (75%) title, I'm trying some modification until Google will tell me that is ok.

[Sergio Longhi]

Ok, so I reduced the amount of similar words and Google finally is telling me that those pages have no more any duplicate title.
So, if too many words are similar Google tells you that they are kind of equal.

[keyplyr]

Good work :)