How can I avoid duplicate titles and descriptions on user-generated pages?

Question

I want to allow my users to upload images to my website with a location and a comment and to share that page on social media. I was planning to have the comment and image as content for SEO, but I'm trying to figure out what to set the page title and description to.

When the user uploads an image, I was planning to use the location in the page title (E.g. John, Los Angeles, California - or something similar) and the comment as the page description (cut to a maximum of 150 characters). However, this could lead to duplicate titles and descriptions, especially if a user uploads the same image, location and comment multiple times for some reason.

Is there a good way to handle this or to handle page titles and descriptions on user-generated site pages?

Thanks in advance, Ian

Answer 1

I think the only thing you can really do is validate when a user uploads. If the same location / description has been uploaded, check they mean to do so before the form is submitted (in a similar way to how this site tries to prevent duplicate questions).

You could actively prevent them using the same description at this point, but they are likely to just add a letter to the end to get around it.

It is worth noting that the worst thing duplicate content can cause when hosted on the same URL is to have one page chosen as canonical and the others pushed down the listings (if the entire page is the same). I've never seen any examples of duplicate content on the same domain getting any sort of penalty that effects the other pages on your site.

If the titles and descriptions are the same, but the other content different, then Google will usually just choose its own title and description from the unique text and treat them as separate pages.

It doesn't sound a major SEO issue.

Answer 2

You could start appending a unique number to the title. I find this technique useful when Googling for stock photo images ... sometime I see multiple images with the same title but a different numeric ID appending after the name which tells me immediately that these are different images.