Duplicate meta tags can cause serious harm to your search engine rankings and affect the flow of organic traffic to different pages. If multiple pages on your website have the same meta tags, the search engine won’t know which page provides the needed information and should appear on the SERP.
If you want to get maximum traffic and utility from your pages, it is important to ensure the metadata is unique in all pages. Here’s a brief guide on how to identify and fix duplicate meta tags.
Google Search Console
The easiest way to identify duplicate meta description tags is to use the Google Search Console. You need to make sure your website is registered with Google Search Console if you want to utilize this tool, which is easy to do if you already have Google Analytics. Here’s what you need to do:
· Go to Search Appearance on your Dashboard.
· Click on the HTML Improvements menu.
· You will find options Duplicate Meta Descriptions and Duplicate Title Tags.
· Explore these pages to find the duplicates.
Google Search Console is a little limited and won’t show all types of duplicates. However, this tool is an effective starting point and will help you create a preliminary list.
Desktop Crawler Software
These programs are specifically designed to crawl a website and find duplicates. Their function is similar to regular search engine bots, which means they’re very thorough. These bots can detect all kinds of SEO issues, including these duplicates so they’re useful tools to have in your arsenal. The software will provide a list of pages with duplicate descriptions once the website is scanned thoroughly.
There are several desktop crawling software programs available online. You just need to choose an option that works well for you. A combination of Google Search Console and Crawler programs should be sufficient.
You can also conduct a manual search if your website is small. If you have only three to five pages, it is easy to browse through all of the descriptions and see if they are duplicates or unsuitable.
