Product pages - should the meta description match our product description?

[markjoyce]

Hi,

I am currently adding new products to my website and was wondering, should I use our product description (which is keyword optimised) in the meta description for SEO purposes? Or would this be picked up by Google as duplicate content?

Thanks in advance.

[AndyMozster]

Avoid duplicate text. My understanding of best practice here would be to have unique content and intent to the meta description. Intent since this is encouraging engagement more than just describing the product.

What happens if you don't enter a meta description? If your product pages are really thin on content then Google may have difficultly scraping its own meta description. However, you've mentioned that prioduct descriptions are already optimised so hopefully that includes being rich and Google can create its own descriptions.

How could you create meta descriptions without bespoke copy? Two programmatic approaches to the meta tags come to mind. 1.) Scrape you own product descriptions as you suggest or 2.) create a template meta tag with variables for product name, category, etc , perhaps some randomised part sentences if you're feeling adventurous. Both approaches are going to look a little redundant/duplicate to Google however.

In my opinion, if you can't create bespoke meta descriptions, you might be best leaving it blank.

[markjoyce]

Thanks for the advice, that's really helpful.