Duplicate meta descriptions

It is the two lines under the title in a search result: the only sales copy a searcher reads before choosing between your result and the one below it.

Google has stated the meta description is not used as a ranking signal. It influences the click, not the position.

Search engines treat it as a suggestion. Google documents that it generates a snippet from the page when it judges that more useful for the query, which happens routinely — and a description that describes every page is exactly the case where it will.

So the cost of duplication is not a penalty. It is that you wrote something, it was ignored, and an algorithm chose a passage instead.

A template constant. The site description set once in a configuration file and emitted on every page. The duplicate count equals the page count, which makes it unmistakable.

A section default. Every product in a category inherits the category's description, so the duplication clusters by section rather than spanning the site.

Paginated and filtered listings, where page two through page forty all carry the description written for page one.

A field that falls back. A template using the page's own description when present and the site's when absent looks correct and produces duplication wherever the field was left blank — which is most of the catalogue.

On one page: `document.querySelector('meta[name=description]')?.content`.

Across a site, the measure is the ratio of distinct descriptions to pages. A ratio far below one is a template applying a constant, and grouping the duplicates shows whether it is site-wide or per section.

Then read the groups. Pages sharing a description that also share a title are usually near-duplicates of each other, which is a different and larger problem.

In Search Console, the Performance report shows pages with impressions and few clicks. That is not proof of a bad description, but it is a reasonable place to start looking.

Compose rather than concatenate. A sentence with the page's own fields dropped into it reads naturally and varies by construction: `Blue running shoes from Acme, sizes 36-47, free returns within 30 days`.

That works where the pages are rows in a set — products, locations, listings. It fails where pages differ in kind: fifty articles on unrelated subjects cannot share a sentence structure, and a template applied to them recreates the duplication in longer words.

So split by page type. Generate for the pages that are rows; write by hand for the pages that are documents. Most catalogues have far more of the first than anyone expects.

For pagination, append the page number, or accept that paginated URLs are not the ones you want in results and say so with the appropriate directives.

Where neither is worth the effort, leaving the field empty is a legitimate decision. An absent description lets the search engine pick a relevant passage; a duplicated one gets ignored and costs maintenance.

The specific thing this page offers, in the words a searcher would use. Not the category it belongs to, and not the company that publishes it.

Front-load it. Desktop results truncate around 155 to 160 characters and mobile earlier, so anything essential belongs in the first clause.

Do not concatenate keywords. A description reading as a list is worse than the automatic snippet it replaced, because search engines will disregard it and show body text anyway — so it costs maintenance and achieves nothing.

Do not repeat the title. The two appear together in a result, and a description restating the title wastes the only two lines you control.

Where the page answers a question, answering it in the description is unusually effective: a searcher who reads the answer and still clicks is a searcher who wants the detail.

`seo.meta_description` reads the description of every page the crawler reached and reports both the pages with none and the groups sharing one, with the URLs in each group.

The grouping is what makes it actionable: it shows whether the cause is one site-wide constant, one section's default, or scattered pages where the field was left blank. Those are three different edits.

`seo.duplicate_titles` sits beside it, because a group sharing both a title and a description is usually a duplicate-content question rather than a metadata one.