Best practice: unique meta descriptions on blog 'tag' pages

[peterdbaron]

Hi everyone,

I'm curious, are there best practices for introducing unique meta descriptions on blog tag pages (I'm using wordpress)?

For instance, using platinum seo, on an original post, the meta description is either the excerpt or a specified custom sentence. It doesn't appear that platinum seo allows for custom descriptions on tag pages.

Love to hear your thoughts.

Thanks!

Peter

[KaneJamison]

I usually noindex Wordpress tag pages, meaning I tell Google not to show them in search results. This is because they don't add a ton of SEO value to the site - tag pages are typically 100% duplicate content.

That said, IF you provide a custom description at the top of each tag page, you could make an argument for keeping them indexed, since there would now be relevant unique content at the top of each page.

Here's an example from a personal site where I keep my category pages indexed: http://www.seattlehomestead.com/category/gardening/. See the paragraph at the top of the page? That's the minimum amount of unique content you'd want on a tag or category page to keep it indexed.

[peterdbaron]

Thanks for replying, Kane. I'm with you re: noindexing of tags. I'm all for it, but I have a few tags  that return a reasonable amount of traffic on a daily basis. I'd hate to cut it off so I guess I'm forced with dealing on a tag by tag basis (ugh).

After I posted this I figured out how to 'activate' the tag description on my blog (it was a theme issue). So, now it's off to setting up custom descriptions...

[KaneJamison]

Gotcha. I agree - don't cut off the traffic if those pages are already ranking. Unique descriptions for each tag page are definitely the way to go, if you can keep up with all of your tags. This will obviously be much easier if you use 1-3 tags per post, and not 10 random ones. I personally try to reuse tags as much as possible, and combine similar ones... helps keep your sanity.

For the record, I consider the unique paragraph approach the ideal solution for categories and tags, but typically tags are harder to keep up with.

[BryanCasson]

My opinion is that the tag pages if done correctly are not considered duplicate content, just make sure that you only use excerpts on your tag pages and not the full article. Custom descriptions for tags is not found in Platinum SEO as there is no need, you can assign tag descriptions directly from Wordpress > Posts > Tags . Just like you, my tag pages rank very well and bring me a lot of traffic

[bizint]

Hi Chaps, Nice thread....is there a plug in that will take the title and description of your tags and put it into the page? It seems kinda obvious... I'm happy to write unique content for each tag page (I have the same issue, alot of my tag pages rank well)...but I want to improve those tag pages with unique content. It kinda seems ridiculous why it is not easy to add unique content...perhaps a unique "area" - but without using a widget of text that only shows up on a give tag page (perhaps using widget logic! zzz).

I have like 200 tag pages.....if I could just have a plugin that takes the tag title - as page h1 title and the description as a unique intro paragraph that pops up automatically  each one (if I choose to write it)...I guess that would be better. All I would have to do is keep the descriptions up to date in the wordpress back end?

I'm amazed that someone hasn't done this, because tags and categories are a great way to build a deep seo friendly  website - and then with time and effort, it should be equally easy to edit those pages (as if they were a page), and why they aren't is a mystery to little old me....but I'll settle for an easy way to create a unique header and paragraph for the moment!

[juicyresults]

Kane is correct here.

Generally, you don't want to index tagged pages because you'll run into duplicate content issues in addition to providing useless pages that do not bring much value.

In terms of user navigation, tagged pages can be convenient but not as a strategy to grow your site. Here's another example of a personal site that has the category page with a  "noindex" tag (http://www.onblastblog.com/blog/) and chose to remove tagged pages altogether.

If unique content was written on that category page, only then can it be considered to be indexed.

If you're using WordPress, the best plugin to organize your basic title & description data is Yoast.

Biznit, since you wrote that message a couple years ago, I hope you haven't exploited tag pages by creating hundreds and indexing them.