Duplicate Meta Description and Titles Issues In Blogger

While reading the celebrating post at FalconHive, I realised an important point has been overlooked by me. Although I have written the articles on importance of Meta tags, and how to add meta tags to specific pages, but the solution to a serious error which is very common in almost all blogger blogs has remained un-answered till now in this blog.
The errors or issues in Blogger/BlogSpot blogs is the duplication of meta description tags and page titles.

Before I tell you the reason behind these errors, let's see what are the consequences of these errors:
Due to any of these issues, search engines like Google and Yahoo may consider your blog as filled with duplicate content and titles, which can confuse their algorithm, and thus may lead to penalization of your blog.

Now the reasons that your blog has these errors:
1. In Blogger, although you can add meta tags to the template easily, but these tags are then used for the entire blog  (all the posts). So the description tag, which is only meant for the main/home page gets copied and is displayed for all the pages. Now Google assumes that all your pages are having the same content, which is a serious offense in Search Engine Language !

2. The second issue of duplicate titles arises because Google indexes blog posts and comments separately, and while indexing comments, it again indexes the complete posts. Now this is where a serious problem of duplication of both content and titles takes place.

So you must remove these errors to make a successful and Search Engine Optimized blog.

Finally the solution to the problems:

1. First of all, in the template (Blogger-> dashboard -> Layout -> Edit HTML) find (CTRL+F) the code for meta description tag, something like this:

<meta content="GENERAL_DESCRIPTION_HERE" name="description"/>

Now put that tag in an "if" condition, so that it will be displayed ONLY in the HOME PAGE:

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == data:blog.homepageUrl'>
<meta content="data:blog.metaDescription" name="description"/>
</b:if>

2. For the second issue (duplicate titles); in the same page (Layout -> Edit HTML), click on "Expand Widget Templates".
Then find (CTRL+F) this code:

<a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'>
<data:comment.timestamp/>
</a>

Replace the entire code with this new code:

<b:if cond='data:post.commentPagingRequired'>
<a expr:href='data:comment.url' title='comment permalink'> <data.comment.timestamp/> </a>
<b:else/>
<a expr:href='data:blog.url + &quot;#&quot; + data:comment.anchorName' title='comment permalink'> <data:comment.timestamp/> </a>
</b:if>

That's it. Now within a week or 2 weeks, you may see the difference and improvement brought to your blog by this method !
NOTE: For my own blog it took around 10-15 days to get these errors removed from Google.

To see the changes, you should have an account in Google's Webmaster Tools. Once you log in to your account you can see the errors at Diagnostics -> Content Analysis.

Credits for the 2nd hack: Cranked.Me

**UPDATE: This screenshot will better explain you, how Google considers the same page as two different pages with same title and content, just because it indexes comments separately:

**UPDATE: Thanks to this hack, now in my own blog (BloggerStop.Net) the number of duplicate meta tags and titles came down from around "250 and 80" to "7 and 28" within 20 days. Now Google is more frequently visiting this blog due to less (the so called) duplicate content :)

Blog Admin : Divya Sai

ProBlogger - Inspiring Others Realize Their Dreams!

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