200 DUPLICATE META DESCRIPTION ERRORS ON THE SITE
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>>Crawling
We think we might have found the root cause and waiting to confirm our hypothesis with Google. ::crosses fingers:
>> Spreadsheets
Downloaded! I’ll process this soon; may be tomorrow when I can finish going through all of them, but will sort through them for you. :-)
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All I can say is – Thank you, Thank you .. (x 21).
Will wait to hear from you tomorrow.
Cheers!!
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Howdy,
Here are my notes: https://cloudup.com/cemsgWtNDb1 – click on each image, then click on the “download” link in the upper-right corner to download the spreadsheets.
There are some that need to be checked to verify that the various pages mentioned have different titles or different meta descriptions.
For the “short meta descriptions” list, those all should be checked. If the meta description is “too short” by Google’s standards, they’ll throw a warning for that.
On the other two lists, the vast majority of the items will be self-corrected in time, or you can select the older URLs to be removed. When you reorganized the categories on your site, Google has not yet realized the older categories are not present so it is comparing some of the renamed/replaced categories to their previous version and throwing a warning for that.
Also, a lot of the errors are for posts that the “slug” (the part of the URL after the date, e.g. http://zuri.in/2013/11/02/this-is-the-slug ) changed. Google already had the previous version in their index, so when it changed, it sees the new page, indexes it and then throws a warning thinking that the old page still exists.
Google will eventually realize that the pages no longer exist and remove them from the index, or you can manually use the Remove URL option in Google Webmaster Tools to try to speed up the process.
Google, to save resources, typically only scans pages it doesn’t expect to change monthly or so, so some of these things may appear for awhile until the index catches up if you don’t want to take the time to go through the effort to manually remove them all.
Please let me know if you have any questions! How has the crawl rates been looking?
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Thank you for a detailed response.
I went through the two excel files you shared with me, in thorough detail.
Some follow-up questions for “duplicate meta descriptions”:
1. “will go away, comments page gone” – I assume it means that this error will go away from GWT with the passage of time, automatically, and that I don’t need to do anything.2. “many of these need to be checked. it’s possible that the individual links have been updated, but have not been crawled yet.” – For these do I need to make sure that Excerpts are added by me on each post? If yes, then I have done so. If there is something else that I need to do, please let me know.
3. “will go away, page slug changed” – you are saying that I just stay put, and wait for google to recrawl. Just wanted to be sure if that what it means :)
The reason I ask these questions is because, the excerpts didn’t seem to help the last time around. You are optimistic that it was merely a crawling issue, and these should self-correct in time. Let us hope that is the case :)
Will get back to you soon with more comments. Due to Diwali (its like Christmas for Hindus), I was away from my computer :)
Crawl stats have bounced back – here is the screenshot. https://www.dropbox.com/sm/create/Screen%20Shot%202013-11-04%20at%205.23.47%20PM.png
What do you think about the crawl stats? :)
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With the crawling stats, we believe we’ve resolved the issue. All of the folks who reported poor crawling are responding that our fix took care of it; Google hasn’t confirmed with us yet, but the evidence tells us yes. :-)
For 1 and 3, yes, it should naturally go away. If you really want to, you can use the Remove URL feature in GWT, though it’s up to you if it is worth the time and attention (to ensure you’re removing the right URL).
Since Google doesn’t crawl every page every day, it can take some time for them to get around to some of these older pages (they typically check single post pages about once a month).
On 3, if you save a draft of the post, you can edit the slug before publishing it. Since we ping Google when a new post is published, if you edit it after it is published, you’ll keep seeing these pop up.
Have a Happy Diwali!
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Understood about 1 and 3. Thank you for the very good explanation.
Any thoughts on #2:
>>2. “many of these need to be checked. it’s possible that the individual links have been updated, but have not been crawled yet.” – For these do I need to make sure that Excerpts are added by me on each post? If yes, then I have done so. If there is something else that I need to do, please let me know.Thank you for letting me know.
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If you’ve added different excerpts to each and the page titles are different, you should be okay once the pages are crawled again by Google.
Hope the holiday is going well!
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Hi. Thanks for getting back. Holiday went very well indeed. As with all good things, its over too soon :)
So crawl stats seem to be fixed.
I worked on all excel/csv file you shared with me, on items marked “need to be checked.” – I did check them, and where applicable have added the descriptions/excerpts/titles so that over time (when google re-crawls) these errors will go down.
Just for me to understand clearly – say, left-hand side represents things we write on wordpress.com, and right-hand side is how google sees those things. So for posts:
Manual Excerpts == “Meta Description”
Title == “Title”
For images:
Description == “Meta description”
Title == “Title”
Alt Text == Well, something google sees to tell what the image is about
Caption == ? [I don’t know how google reads captions]Is this correct? I will keep these in mind going forward.
About the 404 errors, I am not doing anything as of now, as you said that it doesn’t impact search performance. However, it does create problems for users (in case they try to access an old indexed page), so I will use the “Remove URL” feature on GWTs and correct them manually.
I cannot thank you enough for your patience and persistence in resolving these issues. WordPresss.com has bought my loyalty through your help.
Thank you.
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Glad to hear, though, yes, I wish the holidays could be the norm. Though, I’d imagine we would get tired of that by some point!
You’re exactly right—manual excerpts and image descriptions == meta description while title == title.
The alt text is used when the image itself is displayed on a page for screen readers for the visually-impaired so they know what they would be seeing (or for folks who disabled images in their browser). Google may use that to help determine what images appear in a Google Image Search, though I admit I am less-versed in the unique aspects of Google Image Search.
Sounds great. Please do keep me informed on the results you’re seeing and don’t hesitate if you have any questions or need anything else! Cheers!
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Hi,
SoS.
The meta description, duplicate title, short desc errors are just going up and up. I tried the remedies you had recommended, and waited for sufficient time to pass to get a clear picture.
Here is the latest report from gwtMeta description Pages
Duplicate meta descriptions 341
Long meta descriptions 0
Short meta descriptions 261Title tag Pages
Missing title tags 0
Duplicate title tags 158All figures significantly higher than earlier.
Any suggestions on how to correct these errors? Please let me know your thoughts.
Crawl stats seem fine now.
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Can you send the reports again as before (the CSV version is fine)?
Google re-crawl pages on their own schedule with suggestions from your site’s sitemap. The vast majority of pages on a site don’t need be to reindexed that often—monthly is usually fine—so two weeks may not be enough time to see the full benefit.
As before, these errors aren’t negatively impacting your search engine results.
Thanks!
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