SEO finding
Several pages share the same meta description
SEO Warning Severity: Low
Part of the audit Meta description. Finding id: seo.duplicateMetaDescriptions.
What it costs you
The same text under several of your results tells searchers nothing about the difference. Search engines tend to ignore it and pick their own text.
What to do
Give each page its own description. If the pages come from one template, fix the template.
What it checks
- Same description used on other pages
How to fix it
Make the template build a distinct description
- Check the template_id of the pages in the group: one template usually causes all of them.
- Fill the description from a field of the page itself, such as its summary or first paragraph.
- Where no such field exists, leave the description out. A missing description is better than a wrong one.
How to check: Recrawl the site: the group is gone.
A real case
Researchers at Ahrefs compared the meta descriptions of top-ranking pages for 20,000 keywords with the snippets Google showed, and found that Google replaced the written description 62.78% of the time.