On my
blog I have
Categories (done using tags) and a monthly
Archive
With the blog posts themselves the regular SEO stuff is great, I can give unique meta title tags & description tags.
The issue:
When you click on any of the Categories or any of the months (or author's names) you get a list of the blog posts associated with that criteria. This list page uses the container template and so the [[*pagetitle]], [[*longtitle]] [[*introtext]] which I use for the meta tags will be the same for
every list page.
Now when I go to Google's
Webmaster Tools => Search Appearance => HTML Improvements I see
Duplicate meta descriptions and
Duplicate title tags so the more categories, the more archives, the more authors you have, over time, the more duplicates you will get. Which is bad for SEO.
The (partial) solution:
The way I have solved this, for example for the title tag, is by writing a snippet that I put in the template title tag and that reads what the blog tag (available in $_GET['tag']) is and outputs an appropriate length string (some of the tags are too short) for the title. Similarly for the description tags.
That works fine..... for me, whos happy to go into the code whenever I create a new category. But it's not a good solution for my clients who will need boxes to fill in.
Can anyone think of a user friendly way of doing this?
Thanks
Mike