If you’re already well-versed on meta info and duplicate content issues, you can skip to the next section to learn about how you can fix it with a WordPress SEO plugin.
If you’re still here, let’s talk about the duplicate content issue.
Meta tags are on the code side of a webpage. They are cork bicycle zone meta information (or meta data) about a page, including the title and description. Meta data is one of the first pieces of code that a search engine encounters when it crawls a page.
Meta tags in HTML of the BruceClay.com homepage.
Page source view on a BruceClay.com article
The meta tags tell the search engine what the page is about. That’s why it’s so important that the titles and meta descriptions be accurate and unique within your website.
As smart as Google’s ranking algorithm is at figuring out the topic of a webpage, it still needs help with context. Because it can’t read like you or I can.
So the meta information, especially the meta title, is critical for communicating the topic of the page. This, in turn, helps Google understand that the webpage is a good match for a search query.
It’s a common SEO issue: meta tags on a site having duplicate or similar text. This can be especially true on large websites with hundreds or thousands of webpages.
And it can happen for a variety of reasons. Meta tags may not be a priority, automation software may be used due to too many webpages, and so on.
Regardless of the reason, same or similar meta tags can cause duplicate content issues within a site. Again, this type of duplicate content is especially important to fix because meta tags are the first chance at communicating to the search engine what the page is about.