[Fix] Duplicate Meta Description Error in Search Console | HTML Improvements

Hey, you too stuck and searching about this issue encountered in Google Webmaster Tool [it's called as a Search Console now!]. If you are not aware of this problem, then you need to check your search console dashboard, go to 'search appearance' >> 'HTML improvements'. If your search console showing "Duplicate meta descriptions" error, then you need to go through this page. And improved search engine design detect every and critical error from each of your web page. WARNING: Don't duplicate your meta descriptions and try to immediately fix this Error in Blogger / WordPress / Website - I have checked most of the web optimization tools & used Google web tools, but this Search Console is the best in all and its free for better & quick indexing your web pages in search engines. Moreover, if you have not seen this 'Duplicate meta descriptions' issue derived from Google search architecture, then I recommended to follow these steps described below. It may help your site's visitors for the better experience, website performance and SEO website ranking. This tutorial is all about how to fix duplicate meta descriptions? How to remove duplicate meta descriptions? Just keep reading and follow all the steps shown below.

Fix Duplicate Meta Description Error in Webmaster tool HTML Improvements - Search Console

Last time we saw Top 7 On-Page SEO Basics To Consider Before You Build an SEO Optimized Web Page, and today we are going to learn how to fix and remove one of the critical SEO error from Search Console.

Also check: 15 Quick-Tips to Improve SEO Ranking That'll Generate Huge Traffic To Your Site

Fix Duplicate Meta Description Error Showing Search Console

No need to go into details about how does google search work and how Google search architecture detects these errors. There is simple solution to get rid of this error. Your google webmaster tools find duplicate meta descriptions in your blogger or Wordpress website. You just need to fix pages with duplicate meta descriptions.

Step 1: Edit Custom robots.txt

1. Check your ROBOT.TXT file. Go to http://www.yoursite.com/robot.txt
2. Edit robots.txt in blogger: Go to My Blogs >> Search preferences >> Crawlers and indexing >> You will find the option for 'Custom robots.txt'
3. Click on edit and paste the following text into it.
User-agent: Mediapartners-Google*
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Image
Allow: /

User-agent: Adsbot-Google
Allow: /

User-agent: Googlebot-Mobile
Allow: /

User-agent: Twitterbot
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Allow: /

User-agent: *
Disallow: /*.html
Allow: /*.html$

Sitemap: http://www.yoursite.com/atom.xml?redirect=false&start-index=1&max-results=500
[Change http://www.yoursite.com/ with your own domain]
Here you can also add your sitemap as http://www.yoursite.com/sitemap.xml
4. Now save changes and check & verify robots.txt again.

Step 2: Edit Custom robots header tags

Just below the 'Custom robots.txt' option there is option for 'Custom robots header tags'
Click on edit and make the changes as shown in below pic.

Step 3: Edit each post description from blogger HTML

1. Go to HTML of your website.
2. Find
   
   <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
3. And replace it with following code:
   <!-- Fix Duplicate Meta Description Error from Webmaster tool Search Console -->
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;index&quot;'>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.pageType != &quot;item&quot; and data:blog.pageType != &quot;static_page&quot;'>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.metaDescription != &quot;&quot;'>
   <b:if cond='data:blog.url != data:blog.homepageUrl'>
   <meta expr:content='data:blog.metaDescription' name='description'/>
   </b:if>
   </b:if>
   </b:if>
   </b:if>
   <!-- Fix Duplicate Meta Description Error from Webmaster tool Search Console -->

That's all...

All above steps help you to remove duplicate meta description warnings and it will be fixed after your pages get re-indexed again on Google Webmaster tool. Check your search console after few days and let me know your website results via comment section shown below.

Dealing with the "Keyword not provided" problem in your statistics

This article explains why the proportion of "keyword not provided" visits to most websites is increasing, and gives you options for finding out what keywords people are searching for when they reach your blog.

Why the percentage of not-provided search visits to your blog has increased

If SEO is important for your blog, and if you therefore watch the Stats > Traffic Sources tab in your Blogger dashboard or your Google Analytics results, you'll probably have seen that proportion of your search-visitors whose keyword is "not provided" has gone up a lot recently, to be more-or-less 100% of your Google search traffic.   (In the Blogger Stats tab "not provided" isn't shown - but the number of visits per keyword is now massively less than the vists from Google.)

This is no accident: Google is now witholding the keywords that people use, and (says that) this to protect your visitor's privacy. The issue has been widely discussed in sites like SearchEngineLand.

Opinions vary, but many people believe that

"Not knowing keywords has big implications if you use data about what people search for to decide how to develop your blog." [tweet this quote].

For example,   I publish listings of the contents of old (ie graphical copyright expired) song-books in a particular niche on one of my blogs.  There are far too many songs for me to load the full text or sheet music of all of them. And this is a niche with lots of competition:   there are a zillion websites distributing song-lyrics (most illegally).  But by watching the search-terms that led people to arrive at certain pages, I can identify particular songs that people were looking for and not finding anywhere else (the so called "long tail" of search keywords). If these songs are now in the public domain, I can make a dedicated page for them, and share what I know - in many cases after doing more research and pulling together information from a range of different sources.    Not knowing the keywords that people use to get to the book-listing pages would totally destroy this approach.

What you can do about it

So far I've identified three alternative options for getting data about what my visitors are searching for.

Ask for user-provided information

I've used Google Docs to make a data-collection form, and invited my visitors to use it to tell me about songs they are looking for.

The advantage is that I can ask them for richer information than just the keywords, eg where / when they remembmer it from, multiple snatches of the lyrics, what style the music is, etc.

But the disadvantage - and it's a big one - is that it only works for people who actually get to my site and then go into the other page where this form is kept, and fill in the form. I don't want to go into details - but let's just say that I haven't been run off my feet!

Get data from WebMaster Central

If you have verified your blog in Google Webmaster Tools, then the Search traffic > Search Queries tab shows the queries that have caused your blog to show up in search results pages, as well as how many times this has happened and what position, on average, you had in these pages.

This is richer information than you get from Analytics or Blogger-Stats, which only tell you about people who actually visited your blog.

But the disadvantages are that data is only kept for 90 days, and it only shows the top 2000 keywords.   Both of these are issues for me - some of my song-book contents are seasonal - if something is being looked for now, then the moment (week, month) may have passed by the time that I've noticed the trend, researched the song and written it up to a standard that I'm happy to publish. So really I want to checking the logs for nine months ago, so I can research things that are likely to be popular again next year.

Get data from AdWords

Advertising campaigns are the one place where Google is passing the search-keywords through to back-end systems. And because of this, Adwords does have data about what your visitors are searching for - provided you've set it up to collect this data. To get it up:

Firstly, sign up for an AdWords account. You probably have to deposit $10 into the account to get started - but you don't actually need to set up any advertising campaigns or spend any money after that.

Then link your AdWords account to your Google Webmaster Central account.

Once this is done, Adwords will start collecting the search-keywords for your blog. To get at the data:

• Log in to AdWords
• Select "All Online Campaigns,"
• Make an empty campaign (if you haven't got one already)
• Go to the "Dimensions" tab
• Change "View" to "Paid & organic".

AdWords will display your stats, since you signed up and linked your account. This includes the top search terms that users got to your site with, number of clicks, number of queries and some other measures too.

I'm only just starting to assess how well this will for for my song-listing site - will update this post when I have more specific information about how well it works and whether I can get actionable results from it.

What other alternatives have you found?

Leave a comment below, and I'll expand this list as we find out more options for accessing keyword-based search traffic information.

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Related Articles:

Using Google Docs to put a survey questionnaire into Blogger

Six reasons why SEO doesn't matter for your blog

Webmaster tools Structured Data Testing Tool - helping bloggers who care about SEO

This quick-tip introduces the Google Webmaster Tools structured data testing tool, which gives you a view of how your site looks to the search-engines.

Today I discovered that Google Webmaster Tools offers tools for testing the structured data on your website.

I haven't seen any announcements about it, just noticed it there when I was looking for something else - so I'm not sure if it's really new, just new-to-me, or I've been lucky enough to get a it before most people do.

You can find it here (or at least that's where I'm finding it):    http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/richsnippets

Once you're at that page, you can paste in either an URL (your own, or someone else) or some HTML, press preview - and the system will show you how the meta-tags, open-graph tags and other Google-supported structured data on your site looks to Google.   This isn't important for many bloggers - but is very useful information if SEO matters for your blog.

And you can also "Select the HTML tab to view the retrieved HTML and experiment with adjusting it." - and so test out the effect of making changes to your template etc.

The results show you:

• A preview of how the URL looks in a Google search-engine-results-page.
• Authorship testing results - whether have a Google+ page or profile associated with the site
• Authorship email verifications results
• Publisher markup verification status
• An extract of the structured data

I don't even begin to understand what all the results mean.    And I'm not sure if we can do something about all results that are shown - eg   checking Blogger-hints-and-tips currently tells me that there are values for properties that I've never set (eg blogid and postid)  and also properties that aren't part of the schema, eg:

• Error: Page contains property "image_url" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "blogid" which is not part of the schema.
• Error: Page contains property "postid" which is not part of the schema.

But, much like the syntax-checker provided by Facebook for checking how successful you were at  installing Open Graph tags I'm sure that this will be a useful SEO diagnostic tool.

Tell Google more about the posts in your blog with Webmaster Central's Data Highlighter - now supporting more data types

This QuickTip is about the new types of "things" which the Data Highlighter tool knows about.

In December 2012, Google introduced the Data Highlighter (DH) - this is a tool that lets you point to items in your blog posts LINK and use them to teach Google how you write about certain things.

Now they have announced that this tool has been extended to cover schema.org definitions of seven new types of things:

• Products
• Local businesses
• Articles
• Software applications
• Movies
• Restaurants
• TV episodes

The basic instructions for using the DH tool have not changed: visit Webmaster Tools, select your site, click the "Optimization" link in the left sidebar, and click "Data Highlighter".

Google now advise that "The tagging process takes about 5 minutes for a single page, or about 15 minutes for a pattern of consistently formatted pages."

After you have done some tagging, you can verify Google's understanding of your structured data. If Google has understood your work correctly, and you "publish" it to Google, then, when your site is displayed in search results, Google will use enhanced displays of information "like prices, reviews, and ratings".

It will take time for this to happen: Google needs to re-index your blog-posts before it takes effect.

Note:  schema.org is a markup language that this tool is based on.    However not all item types are covered by the tool at the moment.   So, for example, we can only use the Data Highlighter tool to show Google how articles, products, TV-show episodes etc are represented on our blogs.    It doesn't go into more detail for things like blog-posts which schema.org does have definitions for.