We are having an issue where our Blog Page Titles and Meta Descriptions are duplicated. I found that this is mainly becuase of the Archive pages. Is there a way to customize the Page Title and Meta description based on the archive Date/URL?
For example, one of the archive pages is:
/blog/archive/2017/09
And the page title is just pulling in the default page title for the blog (Same with the meta description)
How can I make that dynamic so we avoid the penatlies for duplicates?
There is no way at present to alter the meta title or description of those automatically generated blog listing or topic pages, unfortunately.
Fortunately, Google doesn't really penalise duplicate content - at least not the way most people think it does - and even if it did, changing the meta data wouldn't remove the duplication from the content of blog archive pages etc. The duplication within these pages just means they are less likely to rank well, but what would they rank well for anyway?
So in conclusion, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If your core website pages were duplicated, that would be a much bigger problem.
There are a few hack ways. I have seen people using Google Tag Manager to generate Unique Title & Meta Description. Check out this Moz blog.
If you're worried about content duplication; you can also define the rule in robots.txt. I don't know how much these archived pages link help in SEO; but if you don't need it, you can simply disallow it in robots.txt (you can edit the robots.txt file directly in HubSpot).
User-agent: *
Disallow: */archive
This will block the Google Bot from indexing your blog archive page, thus no duplication issue. 🙂
There are a few hack ways. I have seen people using Google Tag Manager to generate Unique Title & Meta Description. Check out this Moz blog.
If you're worried about content duplication; you can also define the rule in robots.txt. I don't know how much these archived pages link help in SEO; but if you don't need it, you can simply disallow it in robots.txt (you can edit the robots.txt file directly in HubSpot).
User-agent: *
Disallow: */archive
This will block the Google Bot from indexing your blog archive page, thus no duplication issue. 🙂
There is no way at present to alter the meta title or description of those automatically generated blog listing or topic pages, unfortunately.
Fortunately, Google doesn't really penalise duplicate content - at least not the way most people think it does - and even if it did, changing the meta data wouldn't remove the duplication from the content of blog archive pages etc. The duplication within these pages just means they are less likely to rank well, but what would they rank well for anyway?
So in conclusion, I wouldn't worry about it too much. If your core website pages were duplicated, that would be a much bigger problem.