SiteAud!tLint Support

Opportunity On-Page SEO

Duplicate meta description

Severity
Opportunity
Impact
Low
Effort to fix
Low
Issue code
duplicate_description

Why it matters

Several indexable pages share this description, so snippets fail to differentiate them.

How to fix it

Write a unique description for each indexable page.

What this means

This page has exactly the same meta description as one or more other indexable pages. The evidence lists them. Capital letters and spaces at either end are ignored when comparing, and only indexable pages that return a 200 are included.

Why it matters

Duplicate descriptions are not penalised, but they give up the one place you control how each page is presented in search results. When several of your pages appear for related searches, identical descriptions make them indistinguishable, and Google usually rewrites them anyway.

A missing description is often better than a duplicated generic one, because Google then picks relevant text from each page.

Common causes

  • A sitewide default description in the theme or SEO plugin, used whenever a page has none of its own.
  • Products, locations or posts created by copying an existing page.
  • Paginated or filtered pages inheriting the category's description.

How to fix it

  1. Find the source: if dozens of pages share one description, it is almost always a template default.
  2. Remove the sitewide default, or replace it with a template that builds a description from each page's own data.
  3. Write individual descriptions for your most important pages.
  4. For paginated pages, either accept the shared description or add the page number.

Verify the fix

Recrawl and compare. Groups clear once every page has a unique description or none. See also Duplicate title, which usually has the same cause.

How it affects your score

Finding this issue on any page costs the On-Page SEO score 0.5 points, plus up to 4 more depending on the share of crawled pages affected. A smaller improvement with a modest effect on its own.

Find the affected URLs

Open Crawl > Issues and pick Duplicate meta description. Each affected URL is listed with its evidence, and Copy URLs or Export URLs hands the list to a developer. The issue also appears in the Action Plan, ranked by impact (low) and effort (low), and in the issues CSV under the code duplicate_description. After fixing, run a new audit and use Compare to confirm the URLs moved to fixed.