Duplicte meta description and titles

Hello all
many time it was stated that meta description and titles are not that important but we should keep them as a good practice. One of the users here stated that duplicate meta description and titles are really bad for Google. any in put on this? is it possible that good meta tags will do nothing to help and duplicate will hurt a site


thanks

Guy

- I agree with this (Description and Title are still important on Site even not on SE's)


- Yap, But not that big deal... this will cause Supplementals on your pages.
Uniqueness of tag and content is a good option to prevent Supplementals.

There is a lot of missinformation published here regarding the use/misuse of these meta tags - read this post for an eye opener seo scoop article

In the post you mentioned above, it explains "Matt Cutts quickly found many duplicate sites"...or something like that. Any ideas or recommended tools you think Cutts uses to find those duplicate sites?

RUBBISH! ...and more misinformation to cloud the issue of misinformation.

Try this 1 + 2 + 3 + 4 - 5 + 6 + 7 + 8 + 9 - 10 = 40

That's easy enough and the answer is what it is...

That's what the article suggests... you know all the variables good and bad and how they affect the others... and this is how it really is:

1 + x + y + b - z + a + c + w + d - v = 1 + xybacwd - zv = ?

A highly experienced educated guess, a good guess, a fair guess, a poor guess and an totally uneducated guess is still a guess... and "guesses" (of this nature) are inherently full of mis-information and bad advice...

A professional with a 2 minutes look of a website they have never seen before is only feeding their ego. IMHO

Fathom - on a tangent, how does Cutts discover duplicate sites quickly?

Google advance search features... copyscape.com uses the same features through the API.

Hello
so basically there is no common knowledge that meta tags duplicate or not help in any way. accept that the article linked above shows that meta tags were helping a site even if it was spammy. So one would conclude that Meta tags important or not, just maintain them and hope for the best.
Thanks Guy

Unique is always better, Google rewards unique content, Title and Meta description tags are a method of facilitating that process. How much they help I dunno, how detrimental they are I dunno. Really all depends like Fathom said.

If you try a site: search and find that a lot of your pages will only show up after you hit the "omitted results" link, try making your meta tags unique to each page and try again as soon as they're cached/indexed.

If it doesn't work (...hmmm...) try something more drastic.

Sure, there is common knowledge. Pretend you are a human. Now go visit a site with duplicate titles and one without. Which did you like better? I bet the former. This is the trend. This is common knowledge. This helps a site. This may or may not help your seo efforts or ranking directly, but I would bet it does!

There.

I have personally seen my Serps go up on one of my sites after removing duplicate title and meta tags. Add that to the desired click through rates you want to obtain and, in my opinion, unique titles and descripts are a must.

Even if they don't matter that much, and even if you don't believe me when I say they affected my Serps, its a minor piece of the puzzle, why would you ignore them? Count it as part of good site design, problem solved.

Like supplemental listings? Page titles are super important and should never be duplicated. Page descriptions not as important but making googles job easy is a big part good seo strategy.

My website has 50,000 pages and would be impossible to have a different title for each page.

Does anyone have a script that can rotate titles and maybe even descriptions? I'm using php

Why not take a snippet of the pages actual copy and have php pop that in the titles? that should give you fairly unique tiles across the board. I have sites with over 400,000 pages and all titles are unique.