Because, I do not know how to frame the question for this one, I'll just type in while I think through this. Sorry if the post gets big. I'm talking about Explainstuff where science and technology concepts are explained frequently for kids and teens and grownups to learn. I hard coded some meta tags title, description, keywords and a few others in my index.php I am also using the All in one Seo plugin. So, now when I go to a inner page or a post, and look into the source, I see both the meta tags - one that I hard coded and the other that is from the plugin. So, my question is ... Does having two tags with same name decrease our SEO? Also, won't spiders/algorithms get confused as to which one to focus on. Site wide description will obviously be different than the post wide description and keywords...right? Then which is the algorithm going to take while getting entities in search algorithms? If they take the sitewide description in the index file, they will have same description throught out the site and hence not optimised search results. Am I thinking this right? Do you have any guidlines as to how you maintain meta tags and the tags with the plugins? Question pertaining to Explainstuff.com
I've just written a article on META TAGS. I think it will be very useful for my newbie friends How to Optimize your Meta Tags For futher quiers you can interact with me via commenting below.
I would strongly suggest that you get rid of the hardcoded site-wide tags and use the post-specific elements generated by All In One SEO. Having the same <title>, <meta name="description>, and/or <meta name="keywords"> on multiple pages is never a good idea. Having two conflicting instances of each on ever page can only make the situation even worse. There is not one answer that fits all engines here. One engine might take the first one... another engine might use the last one it encountered... one might ignore them both... It's impossible to tell without testing. Either way it's not good.