Duplicate Content: Making Sure Meta Tags are Unique

Darren Franks - May 6, 2010

Duplicate content can come in many shapes and sizes. For instance, there can be duplicate pages, duplicate domains and lack of canonicalization. What most people often don’t realize is that one of the most common and easiest to fix forms of duplicate content can be the meta titles and descriptions. It has been said that by simply tweaking ones title tags, a site can gain significant positions in the search engines.

Titles tags are probably the most important of the meta tags for two reasons: search engines weigh them very highly and users can actually see them as they appear in the browser window and in the search engine results pages. Making these unique, at least on the top level pages, can make a world of difference to a website’s ranking possibilities. People need to understand that the search engines can actually choose to display a different title tag to the one that’s on the website if they feel the one they choose is more appropriate. Constructing title tags so that they are at an appropriate length (70 characters or less), and making sure they are unique, relevant and have the primary keyphrase for the page will ensure that you choose what content is displayed in the SERPs, not the search engines.