Multiple meta description tags may confuse search engines. All additional meta descriptions should be removed from your page so there is only one.
Here’s how to do it.
Table of Contents
Multiple Meta Description Tags Confuse Search Engines
Search engines expect only one meta description tag. If there is more than one, search engines like Google may get confused and either combine the multiple instances of the meta descriptions, or ignore the descriptions altogether.
Because of this, search engines will determine which meta description appears for your site, giving you no control over what appears in the search results.
In SEO, it’s always best to keep as much control as possible over what information is served to users.
How to Remove Extra Meta Description Tags
A meta description tag looks something like the following, with example text used to show you what the meta description is meant to be:
<meta name="description" content="This is an example metra description.">
And so, a page with multiple meta description tags will have more than one case of <meta name="description" content= in its code.
To determine which tag to get rid of, consider the page that the meta description is describing. The meta description is meant to summarize the contents of a page. Both users and search engines then use this information to determine how relevant a page is to a query.
The meta description can also influence a user’s likelihood to click-through to your organic listing.
Recommended Reading: How to Write the Perfect SEO Meta Description
Once you know which meta description to keep, the others can be deleted. To do that, locate all the instances of <meta name="description" content=. Then, remove those lines of code from the HTML.
If you don’t have the ability to make adjustments to your site’s code, the dev team should be able to help you.
How to Remove Meta Descriptions at Scale
Another way to remove extra meta description tags is with SEO execution platform ClarityAutomate. This way, you can remove unnecessary meta description tags site-wide with just a few clicks.
Each additional meta description tag can be removed using the following optimization:
- Select what you'd like to optimize: Code
This solution involves making a change to the page’s code.
- Choose how you'd like to optimize it: Delete
As opposed to adding or updating a site element, something needs to be removed.
- XPath location: XPath of the meta description to be removed
Lastly, specify the location of the tag that will be removed.
Before and After
A few clicks in ClarityAutomate is all it takes to remove extra, unnecessary instances of <meta name="description">.
