Product pages - should the meta description match our product description?
-
Hi,
I am currently adding new products to my website and was wondering, should I use our product description (which is keyword optimised) in the meta description for SEO purposes? Or would this be picked up by Google as duplicate content?
Thanks in advance.
-
Thanks for the advice, that's really helpful.
-
Avoid duplicate text. My understanding of best practice here would be to have unique content and intent to the meta description. Intent since this is encouraging engagement more than just describing the product.
What happens if you don't enter a meta description? If your product pages are really thin on content then Google may have difficultly scraping its own meta description. However, you've mentioned that prioduct descriptions are already optimised so hopefully that includes being rich and Google can create its own descriptions.
How could you create meta descriptions without bespoke copy? Two programmatic approaches to the meta tags come to mind. 1.) Scrape you own product descriptions as you suggest or 2.) create a template meta tag with variables for product name, category, etc , perhaps some randomised part sentences if you're feeling adventurous. Both approaches are going to look a little redundant/duplicate to Google however.
In my opinion, if you can't create bespoke meta descriptions, you might be best leaving it blank.
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
-
What happens when most of the website visitors end up at an "noindex" log-in page?
Hi all, As most of the users are visiting our website for log-in, we are planning to deindex login page. As they cannpt find it on SERP, they gonna visit our website and login; I just wonder what happens when most of the visitors just end up at homepage by browsing into an "noindex" page. Obviously it increases bounce rate and exit rate as they just gonna disappear. Is this going to push down us in rankings? What are the other concerns to check about? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is it Okay to have "No Response" pages?
Hi all, I can see some "No Response" pages which gives a error message "Site cannot be reached" or keeps on loading but don't. I have got this list from Screaming from spider tool. Do we need to fix these or ignore? Thanks
Algorithm Updates | | vtmoz0 -
Is it bad from an SEO perspective that cached AMP pages are hosted on domains other than the original publisher's?
Hello Moz, I am thinking about starting to utilize AMP for some of my website. I've been researching this AMP situation for the better part of a year and I am still unclear on a few things. What I am primarily concerned with in terms of AMP and SEO is whether or not the original publisher gets credit for the traffic to a cached AMP page that is hosted elsewhere. I can see the possible issues with this from an SEO perspective and I am pretty sure I have read about how SEOs are unhappy about this particular aspect of AMP in other places. On the AMP project FAQ page you can find this, but there is very little explanation: "Do publishers receive credit for the traffic from a measurement perspective?
Algorithm Updates | | Brian_Dowd
Yes, an AMP file is the same as the rest of your site – this space is the publisher’s canvas." So, let's say you have an AMP page on your website example.com:
example.com/amp_document.html And a cached copy is served with a URL format similar to this: https://google.com/amp/example.com/amp_document.html Then how does the original publisher get the credit for the traffic? Is it because there is a canonical tag from the AMP version to the original HTML version? Also, while I am at it, how does an AMP page actually get into Google's AMP Cache (or any other cache)? Does Google crawl the original HTML page, find the AMP version and then just decide to cache it from there? Are there any other issues with this that I should be aware of? Thanks0 -
Ecommerce SEO: Is it bad to link to product/category pages directly from content pages?
Hi ! In Moz' Whiteboard friday video Headline Writing and Title Tag SEO in a Clickbait World, Rand is talking about (among other things) best practices related to linking between search, clickbait and conversion pages. For a client of ours, a cosmetics and make-up retailer, we are planning to build content pages around related keywords, for example video, pictures and text about make-up and fashion in order to best target and capture search traffic related to make-up that is prevalent earlier in the costumer journey. Among other things, we plan to use these content pages to link directly to some of the products. For example a content piece about how to achieve full lashes will to link to particular mascaras and/or the mascara category) Things is, in the Whiteboard video Rand Says:
Algorithm Updates | | Inevo
_"..So your click-bait piece, a lot of times with click-bait pieces they're going to perform worse if you go over and try and link directly to your conversion page, because it looks like you're trying to sell people something. That's not what plays on Facebook, on Twitter, on social media in general. What plays is, "Hey, this is just entertainment, and I can just visit this piece and it's fun and funny and interesting." _ Does this mean linking directly to products pages (or category pages) from content pages is bad? Will Google think that, since we are also trying to sell something with the same piece of content, we do not deserve to rank that well on the content, and won't be considered that relevant for a search query where people are looking for make-up tips and make-up guides? Also.. is there any difference between linking from content to categories vs. products? ..I mean, a category page is not a conversion page the same way a products page is. Looking forward to your answers 🙂0 -
Links to category pages unnatural?
If people are linking to your site, it would seem natural that the vast majority of those links would point to the homepage, product page, or a article/content page. Let's say you have 100 links pointing to your site, and 40 of them are pointing to category pages. Would this seem unnatural? Does Google or other search engines have a way of determining this as a factor in ascertaining whether the links are natural or not? Is there a rule of thumb when it comes to the pages that are linked to on your site?
Algorithm Updates | | inhouseseo0 -
Impact of recent On Page Optimisation changes had negative impact !
Hi I recently updated some page titles, H1 tags & on page content which overall has seen search results slip down following the first site crawl by google I assume. My question is, should I try to get back the rankings and test and change one thing at a time to see the impact right now or should i wait for a period of time for it to settle down once goggle has crawled the site a few times or will the subsequent crawls have no impact? Thanks Ash
Algorithm Updates | | AshShep10 -
Home page rank for keyword
Hi Mozers I have traded from my website balloon.co.uk for over 10 years. For a long while the site ranked first for the word 'balloon' across the UK on google.co.uk (first out of 41 million). Around the time Penguin launched the site began to drop and currently sits on about page 5. What's confusing is that for a search on 'balloons' ('s' on the end of balloon) it ranks 2nd in the location of Birmingham where I'm based. That's 2nd in the real search rather than a map local search. But - if I search 'balloon' from the location of Birmingham my contact page ranks 5th: http://www.balloon.co.uk/contact.htm but the home page ranks nowhere. So - it's gone from ranking 1st nationally to ranking nowhere with my contact page ranking above the home page (which is a generic word domain). Any ideas?
Algorithm Updates | | balloon.co.uk0 -
Are we penalized if our meta description is longer than 150-160 characters?
I've read on other SEO sites that description can be 350 characters or 60 words long. Some of my descriptions are a little bit over those numbers. Will Search Engines stop crawling through the description at after a certain amount of characters, or will it completely ignore it if it's too long, hence hurting my site's SEO performance?
Algorithm Updates | | jmbuytaert0