More meta issues

[EdHarrison]

Webmaster tools is warning of more duplicate meta descriptions, the login / showcart / search are all taking the same meta description from the index page.

I had to delete all my extendded info pages to prevent this issue recently, now these are appearing!

[brucet]

You won't be penalised for that, but if you really want to use those pages for SEO purposes then you can modify them. This example applies to the Login page but you can use the same principle for all.

- Go to Design | Library and click the Layouts tab
- Scroll down to the Web Page Outer Layout type and expand it
- Right click whichever outer layout your site uses, eg 'Responsive Outer Layout', and select 'Copy'
- Rename the copied layout 'Login Page Outer Layout'
- Double-click the LoginPageLayout selector
- For Place of Setting tick 'Site, then click 'OK'
- Scroll up to the Meta Tags group and expand it.
- Double-click 'Standard Meta Tags'; select ALL the content, copy to the clipboard, click 'OK'
- Scroll down and re-open 'Login Page Outer Layout'
- Find and delete the MetaTags selector and delete it. In its place, paste the following code (if you don't use Facebook you can skip everything after '<actinic:variable name="CanonicalPageURL" />):

<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsEmbeddedPreview%22%20%2f%3e"> 
	<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="<actinic:variable name="EmbeddedPreviewCompatibility" />">
</actinic:block>  
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
<meta http-equiv="MSThemeCompatible" content="yes" />   
<meta name="keywords" content="login keywords" />
<meta name="description" content="login description" />
<link rel="canonical" href="<actinic:variable name="CanonicalPageURL" />">
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22SocialMediaUsed%22%20%2f%3e%20AND%0d%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22FacebookPageName%22%20%2f%3e%20%20%21%3d%20%22%22">
	<meta property="og:url" content="<actinic:variable name="CanonicalPageURL" />" />
	<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22FacebookAdmin%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22%22" ><meta property="fb:admins" content="<actinic:variable name="FacebookAdmin" />" /></actinic:block>
	<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22FacebookAppID%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22%22" ><meta property="fb:app_id" content="<actinic:variable name="FacebookAppID" />" /></actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

- Replace the text 'login keywords' and 'login description' with the keywords and description you want.
- In Site Options | Layout | Site change te Login Page Layout to 'Login Page Outer Layout'
- Click OK and upload

The disadvantage is that any changes to the original outer layout would have to be reproduced separately in all of the new ones. And any future changes to the Meta Tags layout would also have to be copied over.

[EdHarrison]

Thank you - I just get concerned that there is a penalty or why would there be warnings because it clearly warns of "performance"

Addressing the following may help your site's user experience and performance.
Meta description Pages
Duplicate meta descriptions 44

I do not want to use the pages for seo but would rather Google did not see meta descriptions simply inherited from the index page and copied to any page that seemingly should not have a meta description at all such as the login and sitemap etc.


Is there a way of removing unwanted meta from these pages or telling google to ignore - maybe nofollow tags?

Example - these pages are all duplicating the same meta from the index page:

Astronomical Telescopes, Accessories, Eyepieces, Filters, Mounts and Binoculars from Celestron, SkyWatcher
/acatalog/
/acatalog/info.html
/acatalog/login.html
/acatalog/search.html
/acatalog/sitemap.html
/cgi-bin/ca000001.pl?ACTION=SHOWCART
/cgi-bin/mf000001.pl?ACTION=SHOWFORM

[brucet]

The 'performance' warning probably relates to the clickthrough rate from the page listings in search results. That can be affected if the Meta Description is missing or sub-optimal. But ideally you don't want visitors clicking through to those particular pages anyway.

To remove the meta tags, follow the above steps but just delete the MetaTags selector, don't replace it with the other code.

You may find Webmaster Tools then shows a warning about empty Meta Description tags, but at least you won't have duplicates.

[chickenhouseman]

if the pages don't contain anything you want indexing you could no follow them in your robots.txt

the cgi links could have a rel=nofollow added to them to stop the spider following them.

[EdHarrison]

A bit beyond me but thank you, just would have thought out of the box these pages would be hidden, editable or not have meta that was not unique or relevant.

I know the warnings are often not that important but we all need to do whatever possible to please the Google gods these days.

[chickenhouseman]

I've modified the standard meta tag layout so that if the page type is site map or search it uses a different meta description to the global description. If I want to change them in the future I need to modify the standard meta layout but I'm unlikely to do that.

<actinic:block if="%28%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22Section%22%20AND%20%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22Brochure%22%20AND%20%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22Product%20Page%22%29%20OR%20%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22IsStoreFrontPage%22%20%2f%3e" >
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22GlbMetaKeywords%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22%22" >
<meta name="keywords" content="<actinic:variable name="GlbMetaKeywords" />" />
</actinic:block>
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22Site%20Map%22%20%20AND%20%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%20%21%3d%20%22Search%22">
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22GlbMetaDescription%22%20%2f%3e%20%21%3d%20%22%22" >
<meta name="description" content="<actinic:variable name="GlbMetaDescription" />" />
</actinic:block>
</actinic:block>
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Search%22">
<meta name="description" content="Green Valley Poultry Supplies Search page - find poultry products"
</actinic:block>
<actinic:block if="%3cactinic%3avariable%20name%3d%22PageType%22%20%2f%3e%20%3d%3d%20%22Site%20Map%22" >
<meta name="description" content="Green Valley Poultry Supplies Site Map"
</actinic:block>
</actinic:block>

[chickenhouseman]

If you double click on the cart layout to open it you can add rel="nofollow" to any link you don't want the search engine to follow.

<a href="<actinic:variable name="CartLinkText" />" rel="nofollow"onclick="AppendParentSection(this)"><actinic:variable name="CartText" /></a></span>