Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
Is it okay to copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag?
-
I have heard conflicting answers to this. I always figured that it was okay to selectively copy and paste on page content into the meta description tag.....especially if the onpage content is well written. How can it be duplicate content if it's pulling from the exact same page?
Does anybody have any feedback from a credible source about this?
Thanks.
-
If you feel that your are explaining the page the best you can in the meta description that go of it. I think that this is one of the most vital tags on the website. It brings people into your website.
-
Hey Vanguard Communications!
I don't see why doing this would hurt your sites rankings or be deemed as duplicate in any way.
Since SEO is an "experimental" process (which is why you've heard such conflicting answers on this), my best advice would be to give it a try and see how it plays out. Or as EGOL stated, try adding a few extra words if the page content is too short. Or even add a few extra words to make it differ from the page content. Best of luck to you!
-
Think about it like this:
Your meta description is a condensed version of what your page is about, including keywords.
Your opening statement is usually about what your page is about, including keywords.Sometimes you can modify them a bit to add in additional keywords, or to make them more focused on a given topic. To answer your original question, yes it is fine. It is NOT considered duplicate content.
When Matt Cutts is talking about duplications, he means dont have multiple pages with the same ones. Not to avoid having onpage content the same as meta descriptions.
""The way I think of it is you can either have a unique meta tag description, or you can choose to have no meta tag description, but I wouldn't have duplicate meta tag descriptions," Cutts said."
-
I also do this. The meta description is supposed to have a nice sentence or so that is relevant to the page and makes people click. If the content on your page can't do that, you have a bigger problem than meta descriptions.
-
I do this on lots of pages. LOTS.
Many of my pages have an
title
at the top of the page and a short description beneath it. That short description is also used as my meta description. Sometimes I add a few extra words if it is short. I don't think that this hurts me a bit in the search engines.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Does having alot of pages with noindex and nofollow tags affect rankings?
We are an e-commerce marketplace at for alternative fashion and home decor. We have over 1000+ stores on the marketplace. Early this year, we switched the website from HTTP to HTTPS in March 2018 and also added noindex and nofollow tags to the store about page and store policies (mostly boilerplate content) Our traffic dropped by 45% and we have since not recovered. We have done I am wondering could these tags be affecting our rankings?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JimJ1 -
No Index thousands of thin content pages?
Hello all! I'm working on a site that features a service marketed to community leaders that allows the citizens of that community log 311 type issues such as potholes, broken streetlights, etc. The "marketing" front of the site is 10-12 pages of content to be optimized for the community leader searchers however, as you can imagine there are thousands and thousands of pages of one or two line complaints such as, "There is a pothole on Main St. and 3rd." These complaint pages are not about the service, and I'm thinking not helpful to my end goal of gaining awareness of the service through search for the community leaders. Community leaders are searching for "311 request service", not "potholes on main street". Should all of these "complaint" pages be NOINDEX'd? What if there are a number of quality links pointing to the complaint pages? Do I have to worry about losing Domain Authority if I do NOINDEX them? Thanks for any input. Ken
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | KenSchaefer0 -
Best Practices for Title Tags for Product Listing Page
My industry is commercial real estate in New York City. Our site has 300 real estate listings. The format we have been using for Title Tags are below. This probably disastrous from an SEO perspective. Using number is a total waste space. A few questions:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
-Should we set listing not no index if they are not content rich?
-If we do choose to index them, should we avoid titles listing Square Footage and dollar amounts?
-Since local SEO is critical, should the titles always list New York, NY or Manhattan, NY?
-I have red that titles should contain some form of branding. But our company name is Metro Manhattan Office Space. That would take up way too much space. Even "Metro Manhattan" is long. DO we need to use the title tag for branding or can we just focus on a brief description of page content incorporating one important phrase? Our site is: w w w . m e t r o - m a n h a t t a n . c o m <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Turnkey Flatiron Tech Space | 2,850 SF $10,687/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Gallery, Office Rental | Midtown, W. 57 St | 4441SF $24055/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Open Plan Loft |Flatiron, Chelsea | 2414SF $12,874/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| Tribeca Corner Loft | Varick Street | 2267SF $11,712/month | <colgroup><col width="405"></colgroup>
| 275 Madison, LAW, P7, 3,252SF, $65 - Manhattan, New York |0 -
Category Page as Shopping Aggregator Page
Hi, I have been reviewing the info from Google on structured data for products and started to ponder.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Alexcox6
https://developers.google.com/search/docs/data-types/products Here is the scenario.
You have a Category Page and it lists 8 products, each products shows an image, price and review rating. As the individual products pages are already marked up they display Rich Snippets in the serps.
I wonder how do we get the rich snippets for the category page. Now Google suggest a markup for shopping aggregator pages that lists a single product, along with information about different sellers offering that product but nothing for categories. My ponder is this, Can we use the shopping aggregator markup for category pages to achieve the coveted rich results (from and to price, average reviews)? Keen to hear from anyone who has had any thoughts on the matter or had already tried this.0 -
Should I be using meta robots tags on thank you pages with little content?
I'm working on a website with hundreds of thank you pages, does it make sense to no follow, no index these pages since there's little content on them? I'm thinking this should save me some crawl budget overall but is there any risk in cutting out the internal links found on the thank you pages? (These are only standard site-wide footer and navigation links.) Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GSO0 -
Partial duplicate content and canonical tags
Hi - I am rebuilding a consumer website, and each product page will contain a unique product image, and a sentence or two about the product (and we tend to use a lot of the same words in different ways across products). I'd like to have a tabbed area below the product info that talks about the overall product line, and this content would be duplicate across all the product pages (a "Why use our products" type of thing). I'd have this duplicate content also living on its own URL's so they can be found alone in the SERP's. Question is, do I need to add the canonical tag to this page, since there's partial duplicate content on the product pages? And if I did that, would my product pages go un-indexed?? I understand how to handle completely duplicated content, it's the partial duplicate that I'm having difficulty figuring out.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jenny10 -
Rel=canonical tag on original page?
Afternoon All,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Jellyfish-Agency
We are using Concrete5 as our CMS system, we are due to change but for the moment we have to play with what we have got. Part of the C5 system allows us to attribute our main page into other categories, via a page alaiser add-on. But what it also does is create several url paths and duplicate pages depending on how many times we take the original page and reference it in other categories. We have tried C5 canonical/SEO add-on's but they all seem to fall short. We have tried to address this issue in the most efficient way possible by using the rel=canonical tag. The only issue is the limitations of our cms system. We add the canonical tag to the original page header and this will automatically place this tag on all the duplicate pages and in turn fix the problem of duplicate content. The only problem is the canonical tag is on the original page as well, but it is referencing itself, effectively creating a tagging circle. Does anyone foresee a problem with the canonical tag being on the original page but in turn referencing itself? What we have done is try to simplify our duplicate content issues. We have over 2500 duplicate page issues because of this aliasing add-on and want to automate the canonical tag addition, rather than go to each individual page and manually add this tag, so the original reference page can remain the original. We have implemented this tag on one page at the moment with 9 duplicate pages/url's and are monitoring, but was curious if people had experienced this before or had any thoughts?0