Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?
-
I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions.
My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog.
Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content?
Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created?
While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it?
Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please.
Thanks,
Iain.
-
Thanks, Tom - I'll have a go at that and make an actual robots.txt file and upload it.
It is odd though and when I was creating my WP pages there are Yoast Options for each page - several of them I set to noindex, though looking at the virtual robots.txt, these isn't the case. My file just has:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/Thanks again for all your help,
Iain.
-
http://wordpress.org/support/topic/robotstxt-file-4
Thats about the only thing I can find on it. Hope you can gleam some use out of it. Seem rather complicated for such an easy task.
-
Cheers Tom,
Yeah it is rather strange. There doesn't appear to be another plugin that should be causing this. Yoast is certainly the one relating to SEO.
Iain.
-
I think this is where I run out of useful things to add. That seems very odd to me.
Do you have any other plugins active that might be producing a robots.txt file?
-
Thanks Tom,
When I click Edit Files in Yoast it says:
"If you had a robots.txt file and it was editable, you could edit it from here."And yet, I do have one (albeit it appears a virtual one) as it can be viewed here:
http://www.iainmoran.com/robots.txtIf I try to view the site files on the server, via FTP or CPanel, there is no robots.txt file there!
I appear to be using the latest version of Yoast.
Thanks,
Iain.
-
Hey Iain,
There is a way to edit the file with Yoast. It should have a section called Edit Files when you click on the "SEO" part on the left hand side of your Wordpress dashboard. Once in there you should see robots.txt on the top. If you dont see it you might need to upgrade to the newest version of Yoast.
Thanks,
Tom
-
Thanks so much for your reply, Tom - very useful indeed!
I'm using Yoast SEO for WordPress, which apparently creates a virtual robots.txt and I can't see anyway to edit it as such. Unlike the posts themselves, which I can set to "noindex", the dynamic pages I cannot.
Unless I make my own robots.txt and upload it to my server, but I'm concerned that it will confuse matters and conflict with the one created/managed by Yoast?
Thanks again,
Iain.
-
Hey Iain,
I would do custom meta descriptions if possible. Meta descriptions are generally used to "sell" the content. They dont have any effect on ranking and if you dont feel like adding custom content to them, Google will just display the first content the page automatically. It is not considered duplicate content.
I would also probably get rid of those blog index pages from your xml sitemap and no index them if you can with meta robots or robots.txt. Those will produce duplicate content and you really want to drive people and bots to the posts themselves. Not the index pages of the posts.
I also wouldnt worry about the sidebar. As long as you are providing a decent amount of unique content on each page you will be fine.
Hope that helps.
Site looks good!
Tom
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
-
Title and Description for blog pages
Hello, Could you please help me figure out how to create title and description for my website blog's pages? And for projects' pagination (third example below): https://www.titanpavers.com/blog/page/3/
Technical SEO | | VELV
https://www.titanpavers.com/blog/page/4/
https://www.titanpavers.com/projects/page/2/ Thank you!0 -
Can I still monitor noindex, nofollow pages with Google Analytics?
I have a private/login site where all pages are noindex, nofollow. Can I still monitor external site links with Google Analytics?
Technical SEO | | jasmine.silver0 -
Google Displaying wrong URL but correct page title and description in SERPS
Hi. Our second highest performing page on Google is messed up in the SERPS. This is our login page. It always ranks high. It still does, but the URL is incorrect. Google is referencing an old redirect that was for a one off campaign from January 2014. This page has long been redirected. But now the vanity url for this page is what is displayed in Google. The link goes to our login page but once you log in it redirects you to a page saying the offer has expired instead of your account details. This is a huge issue for us. Can anyone shed some light? I'm having a rel canonical added since this page is used for a lot of vanity deeplinks.
Technical SEO | | PollyKane0 -
Google+ Contibutor to: Link To Main Domain or Content Page?
Which is the best practice for the link to claim authorship for a guest post? I have tried both the main domain URL in the "contributor to" section of my Google plus and the page URL where the post is and both show my picture when testing in the Structured Data Testing Tool. Which is best to use? Thanks in advance.
Technical SEO | | WSIDW0 -
Pageing page and seo meta tag questions
Hi if i am using paging in my website there is lots of product in my website now in paging total paging is 1000 pages now what title tag i need to add for every paging page or is there any good way we can tell search engine all page or same ?
Technical SEO | | constructionhelpline0 -
Duplicate page content - index.html
Roger is reporting duplicate page content for my domain name and www.mydomain name/index.html. Example: www.just-insulation.com
Technical SEO | | Collie
www.just-insulation.com/index.html What am I doing wrongly, please?0 -
Duplicate page content
hi I am getting an duplicate content error in SEOMoz on one of my websites it shows http://www.exampledomain.co.uk http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/ http://www.exampledomain.co.uk/index.html how can i fix this? thanks darren
Technical SEO | | Bristolweb0 -
How can I prevent duplicate content between www.page.com/ and www.page.com
SEOMoz's recent crawl showed me that I had an error for duplicate content and duplicate page titles. This is a problem because it found the same page twice because of a '/' on the end of one url. e.g. www.page.com/ vs. www.page.com My question is do I need to be concerned about this. And is there anything I should put in my htaccess file to prevent this happening. Thanks!
Technical SEO | | onlineexpression
Karl0