Multiple Themes Duplicate Content

Question

I have about 10-15 pages in a specific category, and I use three templates to write the meta descriptions of each. Each page has it's own meta description, but it follows one of the three templates that I wrote, I just replace the keywords and make it sound nice and fluent.

For example a template could look like:

1. On this page you'll find all of the X secrets and codes. We have over X secrets to blow your mind.

I would just replace X with the specific names, however I have three different templates like the one above. I would just choose a random template one to fill in a meta description.

Would this be considered as duplicate content, even though they all do look pretty different from eachother? I just want to be on the safe side.

Answer 1

The answer is yes.

Search engine algorithms don't require exactly the same layout and HTML code to detect duplicates, same title tag + meta description + h1 + <p>'s is more than enough for them.

As a webmaster duplicate description is a no no.

However if your template changes do not affect URLs, Having a default template for a given page and being able to change it without having a different URL is fine.

EDIT: I wouldn't recommend using the same description format and just replacing keywords, unless you have like thousands of these pages that you can't bother changing (like facebook does for profiles), in this case, you still can make sure that more important pages have more differences in their description.

+I think that setting dynamic descriptions that keep changing for the same web page is not a good SEO practise. I'll edit my post if I find a confirming source.

EDIT 2: If I have 15 pages and 3 description formats, I would split pages and assign 1 description format to each 5 pages, not keep assigning them dynamically. After weeks of analytics you can decide which 5 pages got more traffic and use that description format in all pages.

Here is and experiment that was made in 2011, it's obviously not working now.

1) Explicitely Me

2) Rishi Lakhani site:me

They both give the same description in search results now, which can confirm that Google needs to choose 1 description for every page.