200 DUPLICATE META DESCRIPTION ERRORS ON THE SITE
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Hi, I have 200+ duplicate meta description errors on the site according to google webmaster tools. The errors are grouped by google – although I don’t understand the precise grouping structure.
One grouping is:
/category/make-up-how-tos/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/2/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/3/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/4/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/5/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/6/
/category/make-up-how-tos/page/7/Google says that the above set of pages have duplicate meta descriptions. Can you please help fix this error in google webmaster tools?
Thank you!
The blog I need help with is: (visible only to logged in users)
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Howdy,
Since category archives are broken up into different pages (typically 10 posts per page), they will all share the same category description, if present.
Since the content description is the same (a page listing posts within that category), the descriptions are duplicated. This shouldn’t be an issue for search results since we want folks directed to the actual post’s page—not a category archive directly.
If your individual post pages have duplicate meta descriptions, that is definitely an issue that needs to be corrected.
Please let me know if you have any questions or need anything else.
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Yes – my individual posts pages have duplicate meta descriptions? How do I correct that?
You had mentioned that I should add descriptions for each of my categories and tags – I have done so, but my “duplicate meta descriptions” errors have only crept up (Currently showing 212 errors!!).
I would certainly appreciate your help in fixing these errors.
Thank you -
When I go into google webmaster tools –> Search Appearance –> HTML Improvements – this is what I get:
HTML Improvements Last updated Oct 21, 2013
Addressing the following may help your site’s user experience and performance.
Meta description Pages
Duplicate meta descriptions 213
Short meta descriptions 122
Duplicate title tags 101I really need help in fixing this. Thank you in advance for your help.
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Hi,
You’ll need to add an excerpt to each post. Your post recent post has one, so if you need further instructions, please let me know.
Regarding tags, categories, and newly-excerpted posts, I suspect the errors will still appear until the next time Google scans those pages, which may be partly to account for the number.
From the other thread:
“Your date-based archives will continue to use the tagline as the meta description; however, as it’s better for both you and the user for folks to land on specific posts (instead of a date-based archive), it’s not an issue.”
I didn’t understand what you just said :)Some of the duplicate entries will be because the date-based archive pages (e.g. the yearly http://zuri.in/2013 or monthly http://zuri.in/2013/10 or daily http://zuri.in/2013/10/21) will continue to have duplicate meta data. Frankly though, those pages aren’t ideal for your visitors to land on. Category/tag pages are better. Individual post pages are best. If the date-based archive paged have duplicate meta content, it’s not a bad thing per se since they are the high-value targets for search results.
In short, with the category/tags and individual post pages updated, your visitor’s experience will not suffer by having those duplicate meta tags. The errors aren’t “fatal”, just notifications for you to explore to ensure what’s there is intended or, if not, to correct.
Search engines themselves rarely actually use the meta description as part of the search algorithms. If they’re used, it is mainly to display the snippet of text under the title in the search results.
If you have any other questions, please let me know. Cheers!
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Thank you for a very detailed and prompt reply. I will certainly add an excerpt to my posts. As you say, hopefully this should correct the error.
I don’t have a problem with the date-based archive pages or category/tag pages – what I had asked help was with the 404 pages that keep appearing on the site. Currently google says that I have 11 such pages – why do these appear? and how can I correct this issue?
1. category/make-up-how-tos/nails-tips-n-tricks/
2. category/gurus/
3. category/tips-n-tricks/
4. 2013/10/13/beauty-tips/
5. 2013/04/11/beauty-tips-n-tricks-how-to-stren
6. 2012/11/23/tips-n-tricks-12/
7. tag/adding-depth-to-eyes/
8. tag/lip-pencil/
9. category/face-brushes/
10. 2012/11/23/tips-n-tricks-16/
11. category/brushology/face-brushes/
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With the 404 errors, most likely, those pages existed at one point in time and then were deleted. Since they did exist long enough to get picked up by Google, now Google is reporting that they’re now missing.
You’ll need to recreate those particular posts and date them as indicated in the list (e.g. a new post titled “Beauty Tips” and set the publication date to October 13, 2013, create a “Gurus” category, a Lip Pencil tag, etc).
Please let me know if you have any questions or need anything else.
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Hi,
Thanks for replying about the 404 errors. Two questions:
1. Isn’t there any way to tell google that these pages don’t exist anymore? Your solution about recreating these particular posts or categories seems a bit inefficient, given that I ‘cleaned up’ my blog’s structure recently and deleted some tags and categories that didn’t make sense or were too broad.2. I have added excerpts like you suggested to about 35 of my posts, and waited for a few days to report back to you – but there is no drop (at all!) in the errors I reported – I still see:
Duplicate meta descriptions 213
Short meta descriptions 122
Duplicate title tags 101No one more issue has crept in! :) — my crawl stats have dropped off the cliff – from about 170-200 odd pages being crawled everyday, now google only crawls 6 or 7. So basically, google has stopped crawling this site! :) ..
I don’t know why this has happened. If you have any ideas please let me know.
Basically, I am trying to write original and high quality content fairly frequently. Its widely appreciated amongst my FB followers (32K + followers of the blog), but I am really (REALLY) struggling with google webmaster tools and I presume that this is significantly affecting my blog’s search rankings. I am not sure, what I can do. I chose wordpress because I was told that one can “Just focus on writing” and wordpress takes care of everything else. Its just not happening for me :)
Please help.
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Did some more digging, and found that when I do “Fetch as google” using webmaster tools – the fetch going into an infinite loop, and the status is shown perpetually as pending. So google cannot fetch my blog pages now. This explains why there must be drop in crawl stats, because google cannot fetch the pages.
The question is : Why is this happening?
The site is working fine. I am almost always on it, so I never noticed any downtime. I searched online, and there are others who have had this issue: https://www.google.com/#q=fetch%20as%20google%20not%20working But there is no clear reason on why this should be happening on wordpress.comAny ideas on how I can resolve this? Thanks as always, for your help. I really appreciate it!
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Hi,
Regarding #1 (404 errors), by crawling your site, Google is aware they’re no longer there. The notice by Google is simply informing you of that they see those pages have been removed.
Regarding #2 (duplicate meta), related to the third issue, that information will update as Google crawls your site. :-)
Regarding #3 (crawling), everything with your site, from a technical standpoint on our end, is functioning as expected. I don’t see a reason why Google’s bot should be running into trouble except for something on their end. Have you reached out to Google regarding this?
Is there an actual error reported? Anything on screen to indicate an infinite loop, or only that it remains pending?
Overall though, Google does set the crawl rate based on their determination of how often your site needs to be checked. Every page on your site doesn’t need to be checked daily—the vast majority of the pages would not have changed. Google realizes that and to save itself the effort, it reduces how often it scans already indexed pages. In other words, just because the stats have changed doesn’t mean that anything is actually wrong as much as Google has become smarter regarding your site.
With them having access to the sitemap, they’re informed of which pages have been added and the last modification date of other pages, so Google has the information to determine better when to rescan pages. They won’t necessarily scan a changed page instantly, but they’ll likely queue it to be scanned in the near future.
In short, keep your focus on your content and don’t let this take away from that :-). Between setting the excerpts, your internal linking to other content on your site, encouraging social sharing and writing quality content, you’re doing all of the right things so notices like what you’re seeing are more informative than critical.
Cheers!
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Just a brief note to say I’m digging in more on the crawling issue. If you have any additional information, please let me know.
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Regarding #1 (404 errors) – I understand. From what I have understood that you are saying, I can ignore these errors – as, “Google is simply informing” me that these pages are no longer present.
Regarding #2 (duplicate meta) – yes indeed, this relates to the third issue. However, google supposed completed crawl of the site over the past 2-3 days since we have been discussing this. So there is an update.
I have added excerpts to most of my posts – I believe over 100, out of 200+ posts on my site. However, strangely, this doesn’t seem to help. Rather this has exacerbated the problem, as I see a higher number of errors!
Duplicate meta descriptions 227 (increased from 211)
Short meta descriptions 111 (decreased from 123)
Duplicate title tags 108 (increased from 101)
This is of serious concern, and needs to be corrected. This the the main area where I approached you for assistance. The solution you proposed (adding excerpts) doesn’t seem to work as expected.Regarding #3 (crawling), this issue persists as of this writing. Although, as you say, if everything from a technical standpoint on your end is functioning as expected, then this is clearly a strange problem. I have some intuition as to why this must be happening. The existence of this problem coincides with my usage of “slideshows” and “mosaic” layout for pictures on my posts. Amongst my last 10 posts, 3 or 4 of them had slideshows. This could have considerably slowed the load time of my page, and this googlebot is penalising the site by refusing to crawl. I have removed all the slideshows (bar one, which is hidden inside a “continue reading” link, so hopefully those aren’t loading now with the main page – zuri.in). Other than this, I cannot fathom why crawl stats would drop so sharply.
>> Is there an actual error reported?
Yes. When I click on “Fetch as google” for my links, the initially it goes into a loop and the page keeps reloading automatically (annoyingly) and after I check back (after a few hours) the error message displayed is “Failed”. There is no further information available on this error message on google help or forums. So “Failed” turns out to be a very unhelpful message.>> Overall though, Google does set the crawl rate….Google has become smarter regarding your site.
I will agree with you, because I am fairly non-technical. Just a housewife, running my blog from my home. If you say so, I won’t worry about it.>> In short, keep your focus on your content…so notices like what you’re seeing are more informative than critical.
I do exactly what you mention. I just write. I was “forced” to read so much technical stuff only after seeing so many errors under “HTML Improvement” with Google webmaster tools.I am considering moving to some other theme, such as “Expound” just to try and see if these errors are related to my theme.
The crawl errors should go away now that I have removed all the “slideshow” related stuff which was delaying page load times drastically. But the duplicate meta tag/title/description related errors only seem to go up! No matter what I do! :)
Please help.
By the way, even though my problem is still not resolved, I am very happy with the attention given to my small little blog from wordpress staff and customer service provided through prompt responses. Keep up the good work. I am sure we can find a resolution soon.
Cheers!!
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>> Just a brief note to say I’m digging in more on the crawling issue. If you have any additional information, please let me know.
Yes. https://www.dropbox.com/s/8slvz57rclrt8v5/Screen%20Shot%202013-10-25%20at%208.19.07%20PM.png
This is the latest crawl stats as of 2 minutes ago. So last night there seems to be an upturn (if you notice the tail end of the graph). I suppose that is a good thing :)
This upturn could be (and I am not sure) a result of removing all slideshow/mosaic related posts on the front page. I noticed that doing any “gallery” related stuff makes pages to load considerably slower. I also learned how to measure it in Chrome (View->Developer Tools->Network – yay!), so the old pages were loading a lot of javascript that was taking 8 seconds or more sometimes. Now its about 4 seconds. Still very slow, but better than before!
Some more savvy folks are able to cache images (I need to learn what this means), but maybe this could improve page loads more.
Mine is a beauty/makeup blog. So not showing images is not an option, and will cripple the blog. I am not going to do this anytime soon, as the top priority for me is to resolve the HTML improvement errors (duplicate meta, short meta, duplicate title) issues. If you have any insights on that or any further breakthroughs, please let me know! Eagerly awaiting to hear from you.
Also, please comment on if I need to use a more google-friendly theme :) .. I know the official position is that all themes are equal, but I have an intuition that some may be more ‘cleaner’ in generating code than others.
Personally, I would hate to change my theme, as all my readers are used to this theme, and I myself love it. But still, it would be great to have some more perspective on that.
As always, thanks a ton for your continued support!
Cheers!!
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We’ll still looking closer on determining exactly why Google’s failure to crawl is happening (we’ve been able to narrow it down some on what is being impacted but still digging as to where the cause may be).
How your theme displays content can make a difference. The themes on WordPress.com are all close to each other in terms of that (compared to some of the themes “in the wild” for use on WordPress.org, which vary in quality a ton!).
Château is pretty solid for your usage though. There isn’t one that I would suggest with the expectation of it providing better for you for SEO purposes.
I’ll keep you updated when I have more regarding the crawl issue. Thanks for your patience :-)
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Ok. Thanks for looking into the crawling issue. I appreciate it.
Btw, any leads into The Case of Duplicate Meta Tags? The mystery keeps thickening, and the HTML errors keep rising, despite excerpts being added.
Cheers!!
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Hi,
Regarding your previous message:
>> “Just a brief note to say I’m digging in more on the crawling issue. If you have any additional information, please let me know.”I wanted to ask you whether purely from a technical standpoint, is there something “odd” about any of these 4 URLs?
1. http://zuri.in/2013/10/15/nail-art-designs-step-by-step/
2. http://zuri.in/2013/10/21/10-amazing-mehandi-designs/
3. http://zuri.in/2013/10/11/contouring-face-makeup/
4. http://zuri.in/2013/10/13/how-to-grow-strong-healthy-nails/I noticed a pattern that GWT fails consistently in fetching these 4 URLs – and goes into an infinite loop. Perhaps googlebot also aborts crawling the site when it reaches any one of these 4 URLs.
Why would Google webmaster tool’s “Fetch as Google” start going crazy when fetching these 4 URLs???
My strong sense is that if we can understand the code generated for these 4 URLs more deeply – then we will have our answers. Is it something related to JS? Is it because (1), (2) and (4) were gallery->Slideshows !? [But then (3) was never a slideshow – but 3 has many pictures and is a long post]. I removed slideshows from (1), (2) and (4) now, as I felt the slideshows were breaking the site. Is it just because the fact that these 4 pages take a long time to load (longer than an average page on http://zuri.in). I don’t know – and no point in me guessing.
But wordpress tech team would certainly know more about what is “special” with these 4 URLs?
Just trying to help. :)
Cheers!!
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Thanks for offering more information. Every little bit helps to narrow down what’s going on. We have a couple of teams looking at exactly why the Googlebot is failing and this may help in that.
Regarding the meta descriptions, I think none of the numbers will change on Google’s end until we figure out that fetch as Google issue. I hope resolving that will give us final insight on the latter.
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Two updates:
First the crawl issue:
1. Crawl issue for the 4 posts I mentioned in my previous message. I reduced the size of every image on those posts by ~76% (reducing by 60% twice). And tried “Fetch as google” again, and for these 4 posts “Fetch as google” was successful, whereas earlier it was failing repeatedly.
2. The crawl stats are still down – there is no improvement on the last graph that I shared with you. I don’t understand why.
3. I removed slideshows from every post where I was using them, with some hope that crawl stats would improve – but saw no improvement in stats after 2 crawls over the weekend.Second:
You asked me to add “excerpts” to pages. I wasted so much time doing so for ~150 posts! Trust me it was very tedious – but I only see “HTML Improvements” stats worsening on GWT. I am actually beginning to feel very dejected with my blogging experience on wordpress, as there seems to be no solution on offer – should I change my theme? what the heck do I do?!!? My posts don’t show up google. This is diwali time in India (its a big deal – like “Christmas” in USA) – moreover this is the wedding season – and I am a bridal makeup artist!!! I don’t even feel like writing a post because none of my recent posts show up on google!!!See the latest error stats below. I just pasted the entire table from my GWT page below:
HTML Improvements Last updated Oct 28, 2013
Addressing the following may help your site’s user experience and performance.
Meta description Pages
Duplicate meta descriptions 244
Long meta descriptions 0
Short meta descriptions 117
Title tag Pages
Missing title tags 0
Duplicate title tags 128
Long title tags 0
Short title tags 0
Non-informative title tags 0These numbers keep on climbing.
Can’t you guys just tell me a fix that solves the meta description issue – I mean if I have to change my theme, I will do it – but please tell me something – some fix – so that I can go back to ‘just writing’!
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The quick response is please give us some time to figure out the crawling issue first. As I’ve said, the meta warnings will likely remain and not change if Google isn’t crawling your site right. We are working on it.
Do keep writing. They will show up in Google (once we get this figured out if nothing else) and the more content on your site the better. While search engine results are important, still having new content that is shared via Twitter/Facebook, etc via social media is also important. Don’t stop because one piece of the puzzle isn’t quite right yet.
I’m chatting with the developers soon and will add this additional information.
Thanks again.
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I don’t think what you are saying is entirely correct. Google is crawling 8-20 pages even though the stats are far (FAR) lower than before. Even with these few crawls, the information on GWT is changing – i.e. resulting in HTML Errors to increase. So you are 100% spot on in saying that both issues might be related, and need to solved – but I don’t think you are understanding my point. Its simple.
On Oct 22nd, you said – “You’ll need to add an excerpt to each post.” – suggesting that this will fix Duplicate meta descriptions.
And I am telling you that the solution you proposed isn’t working.
I think crawling in itself is another major issue – but if google was crawling ZERO pages on the site, then the number of Duplicate meta descriptions would have remained CONSTANT. And I am telling you that its going UP – i.e. the number of errors are increasing. [Despite google crawling 5-10 pages only, compared to say 200 before].
So the two issues in that respect are INDEPENDENT. While I understand and appreciate (really) that developers of wordpress are trying to understand why this is happening – I need to understand why the duplicate meta description errors are present on zuri.in ? what is a duplicate meta description ? what is the “normal” way to fix it – assuming wordpress theme wasn’t generating the code – whats a trivial way to fix this problem? [I understand fully well that we can’t do some trivial/fundamental things, as we can’t touch the underlying code on wordpress – I wouldn’t want to! But I want to understand the problem] And finally, what is the current HYPOTHESIS of your team about why did these errors appear in the first place – which is the Genesis of this thread!!! – you agree?
So, I understand that even if we fix duplicate meta description tags, we won’t understand the full ramifications because google isn’t crawling the site, however – it would be nice if wordpress could offer some solution for this. Right now I feel that we just don’t undrstand why 200+ HTML errors appeared, and why they are going up! [despite trying the excerpts solution]
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