Can Page Content & Description Have Same Content?

[iainmoran]

I'm studying my crawl report and there are several warnings regarding missing meta descriptions.

My website is built in WordPress and part of the site is a blog.

Several of these missing description warnings are regarding blog posts and I was wondering if I am able to copy the first few lines of content of each of the posts to put in the meta description, or would that be considered duplicate content?

Also, there are a few warnings that relate to blog index pages, e.g. http://www.iainmoran.com/2013/02/ - I don't know if I can even add a description of these as I think they are dynamically created?

While on the subject of duplicate content, if I had a sidebar with information on several of the pages (same info) while the content would be coming from a WP Widget, would this still be considered duplicate content and would Google penalise me for it?

Would really appreciate some thoughts on this,please.

Thanks,

Iain.

[VividIT]

Hey Iain,

I would do custom meta descriptions if possible. Meta descriptions are generally used to "sell" the content. They dont have any effect on ranking and if you dont feel like adding custom content to them, Google will just display the first content the page automatically. It is not considered duplicate content.

I would also probably get rid of those blog index pages from your xml sitemap and no index them if you can with meta robots or robots.txt. Those will produce duplicate content and you really want to drive people and bots to the posts themselves. Not the index pages of the posts.

I also wouldnt worry about the sidebar. As long as you are providing a decent amount of unique content on each page you will be fine.

Hope that helps.

Site looks good!

Tom

[iainmoran]

Thanks so much for your reply, Tom - very useful indeed!

I'm using Yoast SEO for WordPress, which apparently creates a virtual robots.txt and I can't see anyway to edit it as such. Unlike the posts themselves, which I can set to "noindex", the dynamic pages I cannot.

Unless I make my own robots.txt and upload it to my server, but I'm concerned that it will confuse matters and conflict with the one created/managed by Yoast?

Thanks again,

Iain.

[VividIT]

Hey Iain,

There is a way to edit the file with Yoast. It should have a section called Edit Files when you click on the "SEO" part on the left hand side of your Wordpress dashboard. Once in there you should see robots.txt on the top. If you dont see it you might need to upgrade to the newest version of Yoast.

Thanks,

Tom

[iainmoran]

Thanks Tom,

When I click Edit Files in Yoast it says:
"If you had a robots.txt file and it was editable, you could edit it from here."

And yet, I do have one (albeit it appears a virtual one) as it can be viewed here:
http://www.iainmoran.com/robots.txt

If I try to view the site files on the server, via FTP or CPanel, there is no robots.txt file there!

I appear to be using the latest version of Yoast.

Thanks,

Iain.

[VividIT]

I think this is where I run out of useful things to add. That seems very odd to me.

Do you have any other plugins active that might be producing a robots.txt file?

[iainmoran]

Cheers Tom,

Yeah it is rather strange. There doesn't appear to be another plugin that should be causing this. Yoast is certainly the one relating to SEO.

Iain.

[VividIT]

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/robotstxt-file-4

Thats about the only thing I can find on it. Hope you can gleam some use out of it. Seem rather complicated for such an easy task.

[iainmoran]

Thanks, Tom - I'll have a go at that and make an actual robots.txt file and upload it.

It is odd though and when I was creating my WP pages there are Yoast Options for each page - several of them I set to noindex, though looking at the virtual robots.txt, these isn't the case. My file just has:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /wp-includes/

Thanks again for all your help,

Iain.