Google Webmaster Tools - HTML Improvements

pullandbang

Here's a question someone may be able to help me with.

My site has about 1,000 pages most of which are indexed by Google. Obviously not every page has a unique Meta Description yet but I'm getting there.

I check for HTML improvements regularly on Webmaster Tools, pick a few pages it says have duplicate descriptions, fix them and resubmit the pages.

Now last week I had a bit of time so it tackled about 100 pages which had the offending duplicate descriptions, resubmitted to the index and after a couple of days was delighted to see the number had fallen from 360'ish down to 266. Yipee, I thought, I'm making progress.
Now this morning when I check it seems I'm back up to 349 pages with duplicate descriptions. I had a look at the first lot and none of them are duplicates in the real world, yet Google is indexing them as duplicates.

Any insight into this would be of great help.......

cant touchthis

Better Forum would be this one for this.

http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=381
http://www.boards.ie/vbulletin/forumdisplay.php?f=1275

yoyo

Moved from Comp & Tech.

IRE60

pullandbang wrote: »

Here's a question someone may be able to help me with.

My site has about 1,000 pages most of which are indexed by Google. Obviously not every page has a unique Meta Description yet but I'm getting there.

I check for HTML improvements regularly on Webmaster Tools, pick a few pages it says have duplicate descriptions, fix them and resubmit the pages.

Now last week I had a bit of time so it tackled about 100 pages which had the offending duplicate descriptions, resubmitted to the index and after a couple of days was delighted to see the number had fallen from 360'ish down to 266. Yipee, I thought, I'm making progress.
Now this morning when I check it seems I'm back up to 349 pages with duplicate descriptions. I had a look at the first lot and none of them are duplicates in the real world, yet Google is indexing them as duplicates.

Any insight into this would be of great help.......

I'd pose the following first:

"none of them are duplicates in the real world" - you'll have to explain that. If fairly dichotomous reasoning on behalf of Google, they either are the same or not the same - regardless of whats going on in the real world.


In terms of the site you overlord: is it possible to auto generate some snippet of uniqueness into the description? Page title, etc - just something absolutely unique.

How did the other 100 pages appear again and why where are they generating the description?

pullandbang

IRE60 wrote: »

I'd pose the following first:

"none of them are duplicates in the real world" - you'll have to explain that.

As in they used to be duplicates to the letter as I'd copied pages when creating new products on the site and didn't have time to write individual descriptions at the time. Each product page was different but the meta description and keywords were the same for each page within a product range. I knew about this at the time and was always going to go back and fix it over time.

So as I said previously, with a bit of time on my hands I went into each meta description and made small changes to them. Usually just adding the individual size to the description - enough to make them unique. I then submitted those pages to the big G and a few days later they were accepted as being unique. The suggested HTML improvements on Webmaster Tools told me there was now 266 duplicate descriptions, down from 350 or so. Great stuff, I was getting there.

Just looking at the Webmaster tools page now and it was updated on 19th May and the number of duplicates is back up to 349. When I click on the first batch of them I get the drop down menu showing which individual pages are duplicated yet when I click on each page they are clearly unique!

I don't want to post loads of links but to give an example, here are two pages within the one product group that have duplicate meta descriptions according to Google.

view-source:http://www.discountpackaging.ie/lightweight-poly-mailers/MAILPC4.html

view-source:http://www.discountpackaging.ie/lightweight-poly-mailers/c4-clear-mailer-resealable.html

IRE60

Ok - from what I see they are different descriptions, regardless of the 'shades' of differences, they are still different.

So, i think that you should take a look at the GWT closer to see if it yields any further info info.

One thing - the crawl rate on the site may not be F1 standard. It would seem that search results appear to have both of the different descriptions - so that leads me to only one conclusion [bar the fact that Google has begun to now look at similarities!!] that the GWT data is lagging (which it can be prone to).

If you have the patience and, to be frank, something like that can wait a few days as it not mission critical to SEO - important but not smack-down stuff - then wait and see what transpires ion the next few days.