Duplicate meta descriptions

A description written once in a template or a plugin default, used on every page that has none of its own.

• Give each of these pages a description of its own: one or two sentences on what this page holds that the others do not, written for someone choosing between results.
• Between 50 and 160 characters. A template can build it from the page's own data — the name, the period, a figure.
• If one that differs cannot be written, leave the description out: search engines then quote the page itself, which beats the same sentence on every page.

Shown for an example shop at www.example.com. In a Trakis report the same fix comes with your own addresses and the list of your pages it applies to.

Compare the descriptions of a few pages of the same type in their page source.

Warning The meta description repeats on 40 pages.

A default description from the theme stands in for pages that have none of their own. (An example shop; the numbers are illustrative.)

CONTENT-006 is a warning in the content category, and weighs lightly in that category’s score. It is a fact about the site as a whole, so it is reported once, not once per page.

If the finding is deliberate on your site, it can be accepted as intentional in the report. It then leaves the list and the score, and comes back on its own if what it shows changes.

• Thin content · CONTENT-001
• Images without alternative text · CONTENT-002
• The title is nowhere in the H1 · CONTENT-003
• Very low text-to-HTML ratio · CONTENT-004
• Duplicate titles · CONTENT-005
• A template settles just under the line · CONTENT-007
• Pages that repeat each other’s text · CONTENT-008

A Trakis audit runs this check and the other 65 on your site, and tells you on how many pages each one sits. Or go back to all the rules.