Same meta description on more than one page
description_duplicateShort answer
Several pages carry the same meta description. Google will often ignore it and write its own snippet, so the main cost is lost control over the snippet — and it is usually a sign of a template default. Write one description per page, or leave it empty on pages where you have nothing specific to say.
Why it matters
A description is only used when it matches the page. A site-wide default ("Welcome to Acme, the best…") matches nothing in particular and is discarded. This is a low-severity rule: fix the busiest pages first and let the long tail use Google's generated snippets.
How Glimana detects it
A site-level rule grouping indexable pages by identical description; groups of two or more are reported.
How to fix it
- Find the affected pages in Glimana. Open Issues › Same meta description on more than one page. This is a site-level check, so the single row carries the full evidence: the URLs, values or days involved. The task under Tasks shows the same list and the expected gain.
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Apply the fix on your platform.
Remove the global default description and write per-page descriptions where you have something to say. Pages without a description are better than pages with a wrong one: Google then writes its own snippet from the page content, which is usually more relevant than a site-wide sentence.
The duplicate is almost always the plugin's default template: Yoast › Search Appearance › Content types › Meta description (leave it empty), Rank Math › Titles & Meta (clear the description field). Then add descriptions on the pages with search traffic first (sort by clicks on the Pages screen).
Online Store › Preferences › "Homepage meta description" applies only to the home page, but some themes reuse
shop.descriptionas a fallback for every page; edittheme.liquidso it falls back to the product/collection/page description instead. Fill in Search engine listing per product.Remove the hard-coded
<meta name="description">from the layout and emit it only when the page supplies one. -
Publish and clear caches. Save and publish, then make sure the crawler will see the new version: WordPress — clear the page cache in your cache plugin and purge the CDN; Shopify — theme and content changes go live on save, but purge any CDN in front of the store; custom code — deploy and purge the edge cache. Check in a private window or with
curl -s https://your-domain/page | grep -i '<title\|canonical\|robots'that the live HTML has changed; Glimana reads what the server sends, not what your browser has cached. - Verify in Glimana. Open the task under Tasks and click Mark as done. The affected pages are queued for a verification crawl within a few hours, and the task closes when no two indexable pages share the same description. If the check still fails, the task returns to New with a note; when it passes, the task is listed under Resolved technical issues on Impact reports. To check sooner, use Re-crawl affected pages on the issue.
How the fix is verified
Re-crawl; the task closes when no two indexable pages share the same description.