Hi All Google Webmaster tool shows that I have the following error with over 1,000 pages: "Duplicate meta descriptions Meta description information can give users a clear idea of your site's content and encourage users to click on your site in the search results pages." Here is an example page: Pages with duplicate meta descriptions Pages =2 A post listing Five OTC-Traded Foreign Bank Stocks as potential investment opportunities. /2010/08/26/five-otc-foreign-bank-stocks/ /2010/08/26/five-otc-foreign-bank-stocks For some reason those two pages are showing differently when they are the same. Page: http://topforeignstocks.com/2010/08/26/five-otc-foreign-bank-stocks/ has the "/" at the end and has PR1 But the other one does not have the "/" and has No PR. I think something is messed up here. My traffic has also dropped considerable because of this. I think Google is thinking these are two different pages and is penalizing me. How can fix this issue? Thanks in advance.
If 2 pages display the same content but one has a trailing slash and one does not then Google will view these as 2 different URLs and you could have duplicate content issues. There are 2 ways you can solve this. You can setup a 301 redirect, to redirect all one type of page (non slash pages) to the other type of page (slash). You just need to decide if you want to use URLs with the trailing slash or URLs without it, and then setup the proper redirects on your server. The other option would be to implement the rel canonical tag so the search engines know which URL to give the credit to. For example you would place a rel canonical tag on both the trailing slash and the non trailing slash pages. The rel canonical tag on both of these pages would have the same URL listed in it. So if you wanted the URLs with the trailing slash to have the credit in the search engines, then the rel canonical tag on both the trailing and the non trailing slash URLs would both list the URL with the trailing slash in the rel canonical tag. This would let the search engines know that all credit for the article should go to the URL with the trailing slash and you will no longer have a duplicate content issue. Below is a link to an article from Google that explains these options more. http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/04/to-slash-or-not-to-slash.html
Hi revium Thank you very much for your help with my issue. This is the first time this problem happened in my site. Last month my site was down a few days when database crashed and then when I fixed everything, these issues came up. Google probably reduced my PR rankings because of the duplicate issue. I will try these options in my site now and report back here on progress. Thanks again for the reply.