How important are unique titles and descriptions?
-
Hi there,
I've recently started working on a very large travel website. One of my main duties is to get it rankings for certain terms (which it is't at the moment, at all!)
A large proportion of the website is dynamic, meaning that the pages, and URLs are produced using sessions. I've already enquired with the company who provide the website about how I can get unique meta data for each page on our website. They came back and said it can be done for the static pages, but not for the dynamic pages. This leaves me with about thousands of pages with duplicated meta data. Not at all ideal.
I was just wondering how damaging this is likely to be to the SEO of my site. Am I going to be able to achieve rankings even with this issue? Or do I need to get it sorted ASAP?
Thanks
-
Wow! Thanks for all the replies!
Funny you should mention that Stephan, thats the exact same solution I put to our providers. Their working on a slightly different solution at the moment, but thats my fallback option.
My main issue is that there would be so many duplicate URLs (tens of thousands!), which the Search Engines would undoubtedly frown upon.
I'll keep you all updated on my progress!
Thanks again
-
It is very important. We also have dynamic pages... a ton of them. However we found a solution by bringing other data already on the page into the description and title. Let's say that each page offers a different vacation package. You should see if the name of the package can be imported into the title and description. Since the data is already there... it can be done.
Come up with some strategy that works with the data you have. For example... with our product pages, we did something like: [product title] - save 35 - 70% at Sierra Trading Post.
-
I agree with Andre, you should definitely go for unique titles and descriptions. Think about your users too: they will see the title tag and possibly the meta description on the SERPS, and it greatly influences a user's decision whether or not to click your search result. You might still achieve rankings without them, but you will not be able to use the full potential of the site.
-
We have just launched a new Travel website aswell. (4 months in the making)
Each page has its own targeted keywords so Meta Descriptions and Title tags for your destination pages are important!!
We found a plugin that allows us to change the "template" for the destination pages.
Tell those guys who built your site that not being able to edit dynamic pages is NOT cool and they need to make a plan!
If you dont put them in, google may decide to rank your home page for keywords instead of the correct tour/product page.
GREG
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
-
Duplicate Product Descriptions
Hi All, After a bit of advice please, we will be selling similar products e.g. A chair which comes in different fabrics and finishes, but is basically the same product. Most, if not all of the ‘long’ product descriptions are identical with only the ‘short’ product descriptions being unique. The ‘long’ product descriptions contain all the manufacturing information, leg option/colour information, graphics, dimensions, weight etc etc. I’m concerned that by having 300+ products all with identical ‘long’ descriptions its going to be seen negatively by google and effect the sites SEO. My question is will this be viewed as duplicate content? If so, are there any best practices I should be following for handling this, other than writing completely unique descriptions for each product, which would be extremely difficult given its basically the same products re-hashed. Many thanks in advance for any advice.
Technical SEO | | Jon-S0 -
Title Tag vs. H1 / H2
OK, Title tag, no problem, it's the SEO juice, appears on SERP, etc. Got it. But I'm reading up on H1 and getting conflicting bits of information ... Only use H1 once? H1 is crucial for SERP Use H1s for subheads Google almost never looks past H2 for relevance So say I've got a blog post with three sections ... do I use H1 three times (or does Google think you're playing them ...) Or do I create a "big" H1 subhead and then use H2s? Or just use all H2s because H1s are scary? 🙂 I frequently use subheads, it would seem weird to me to have one a font size bigger than another, but of course I can adjust that in settings ... Thoughts? Lisa
Technical SEO | | ChristianRubio0 -
Very strange: META descriptions not showing
Hello, Since Panda 4.0 has been launched, all of my optimized META description have been gone in Google.
Technical SEO | | MarcelMoz
A while ago, I posted a question about this problem here: http://moz.com/community/q/all-meta-descriptions-gone. I know about Google's own will to decide which META description will be shown. And also about unique content of the descriptions. All pages did have an optimized description before Panda 4.0 and there were no troubles at all, what tells me there is something else going on. I tested some things: Rewrote 50 descriptions to very uinique ones, only five got indexed. This tells me that duplicate content of the descriptions is not the problem (they have never been 100% duplicate, product type was a variable which was always different for each page). Removed cache in GWT and fetched again as Google, didn't help. I checked the pages I tested and they all have been indexed again without showing the optimized descriptions. More information: The first time I changed some META descriptions and fetched the pages again in GWT, Google picked up my new META descriptions and showed them. A few days later, most of them disappeared again (so Google is aware of the description but seems to ignore it). Some pages show the optimized description when I change my search query (only a few, mostly the optimized description never got shown) Technique is ok. Source code shows the right optimized description. META robots isn't blocking anything except NOODP/NOYDIR (always has blocked those). Websites using the exact same CMS, website template, META descriptions (style and build-up), do not have these problems I compared elements like place of description in source code, usage of meta robots, og:description, crawl-delay in robots.txt, and special characters in descriptions between websites that are showing optimized vs. website that don't show optimized descriptions. I can't find any connection. Something I noticed is a change is my Robots.txt file: my webmaster has added the following command:
Crawl-delay: 2 May this have to do with my problem? I guess it doens't. I did some research and there are more websites that are suffering this problem beside mine. This tells me it must be Google (and so Panda 4.0) that is responsible for this change. I realy want my optimized descriptions back. Does anybody have an idea what to do?
Thanks in advance. Marcel0 -
Title Tags & Url Structure
So I'm working on a website for a client in the Tourism Industry. We've got a comprehensive list of museums & other attractions in a number of cities that have to go online. And we have to come up with the correct url structure, title tags and obviously content. My current line of thought was to work the urls in the following way. http://domain.com/type-of-attraction/city/name-of-attraction/ This is mainly because we think that the type of attraction is far more important then the city (SEO wise) as the country as a whole receives more searches, however we require a city in the url to make it unique because some attractions across cities happen to share names and we don't want to have the names of attractions littered with city names. However for title-tags I wanted to go the other way around, again due to the attraction type being more important then the city. Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction - City - Brand Name or Name of Attraction - Type of Attraction in City - Brand Name I am quite confident in working it this way; however I would appreciate if I receive some feedback on this structure, you think its good or you would make any suggestions / alterations. One last thing, There's the possibility of having many urls ending up with the same city names (For each type of attraction) I would think that just providing a list of links & duplicate text is not enough; would you suggest a canonical pointing to a link containing just information on the city? and using the other pages for user-navigation only? or should i set variables in the text which are replaced by the types of attraction so that the text looks different for each one?
Technical SEO | | jonmifsud0 -
Subdomain CMS or unique URL
I own a company for teams Ex myteams.com . A team registers and they get a site at team1.myteams.com. Content on each sub team site is mostly unique and I have several back links on each to the main site myteams.com. I also provide them with a unique URl team1.com will show team1.myteams.com. So couple questions As far as SEO should i be pushing the team1.com url or team1.myteams.com url? Is a link from team1.com or team1.myteams.com better for my site, their site or both How many back links should the sub sites have? Thanks
Technical SEO | | MichaelRyan220 -
Title Tag Wordpress
I need to know how can I personalize the title tag individually in my categories?
Technical SEO | | nafera20 -
Why has Google removed meta descriptions from SERPS?
One of my clients' sites has just been redesigned with lots of new URLs added. So the 301 redirections have been put in place and most of the new URLs have now been indexed. BUT Google is still showing all the old URLs in the SERPS and even worse it only displays the title tag. The meta description is not shown, no rich snippet, no text, nothing below the title. This is proving disastrous as visitors are not clicking on a result with no description. I have to assume its got something to do with the redirection, but why is it not showing the descriptions? I've checked the old URLs and he meta description is definitely still in the code, but Google is choosing not to show it. I've never seen this before so I'm struggling for an answer. I'd like to know why or how this is happening, and if it can be resolved. I realise that this may be resolved when Google stops showing all the old URLs but there's no telling how long that will take (can it be speeded up?)
Technical SEO | | Websensejim0 -
How important is keyword density?
Several leading experts say that keyword density isn't all that important. What do you think of keyword density? Do you incorporate it into your day to day activities?
Technical SEO | | nicole.healthline0