Hey, I'm new to Digital Point and hoping someone here knows something about this. Our company has a couple of English websites: a .co.uk website for United Kingdom and a .com.au for Australia. A lot of the page content on the UK website is similar/same as the AU website e.g. PageA on the UK website is almost identical to PageA on the AU website. Therefore it's natural to write the same meta title/description for such identical pages across the two websites. For example, the meta title/description for pageA on the UK website is the same as the meta title/description for pageA on the AU website - is that a problem? Is it necessary to write different meta titles/descriptions for such identical pages when you have two English websites for different locations? I wasn't sure so I looked at websites of global brands that have multiple websites in English. Some such websites use the exact same title for identical pages across multiple English websites, and almost the exact same description. So that makes me think it's not necessary to write unique meta data for each website. But everything I know about SEO tells me that I should make sure each title and description is unique, even between websites. So I wanted to check with people here. Thoughts?
Has this stumped people? I can't find any info about this on other sites so perhaps people are unsure how to proceed in such a situation. But I know there are many sites out there that are in the same boat as us
I am surprised that you are thinking whether or not is the duplicate meta description a problem and haven't thought about whether the actual duplicate content of multiple sites can't cause the issue. Duplicate meta description is not a problem at all. However, having identical websites on different TLDs IS a problem. There is a chance that Google doesn't care in this case, since the domains are part of the one and the same brand, but it's a huge flag, especially of the domains are linking to each other, which would be a suicide.
You are having duplication of content issue with your site. Google have a strong filter in place for duplication of content. So only one of your website is likely to rank well. So, It is recommended to first think of having unique content on both the sites, then write unique meta data.
Thanks for your replies. The domains don't link to each other. About duplicate content between the websites - believe me, when I joined this company I was shocked. In the past I've always avoided duplicate content at all costs. But now the company I'm working has multiple websites in English for multiple English-speaking locations, and this changes things. The product and service is the same for all locations and yes, therefore the texts are close to identical. But many brands do this. Think about brands that are in US, UK, Australia, Canada, etc. They all have a website for each country and the content is the same on each website. Take Apple for example. Compare their US site and their AU website. Browse to any page on both sites e.g. domain/macbook/. You'll find that the content on both pages are identical: "Our goal with MacBook was to do the impossible: engineer a full‑size...." So what do they do? My understanding is that using the hreflang tag resolves this problem. I read a lot about this tag on the MOZ website and from a video by Matt Cutts. I think Google is satisfied with this when you use hreflang tag and then knows which website to display depending on the location/language of the Google searcher. What do you guys think? What do you think about how big brands do it, like Apple, Microsoft, etc. which have multiple websites in English for different countries? Thanks a lot