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On my homepage, I am planning on using the following meta description.

Premiere American Ninja Warrior website for fans and competitors. Train for ninja warrior, find obstacle blueprints, and info on the show.

On the other pages of my website I am planning on using a meta description with the following format

Premiere American Ninja Warrior website for fans and competitors. brief description of that page

In this manner, I have a partially duplicate meta description. The first sentence is a brief overview of my site to generate Click Through s and is present on all meta descriptions, while the second sentence serves as a more specific description of that individual page.

Is it OK to have a partially duplicate meta description like in that example?

Update - Extension Question

Does the same thing apply to the title tag. If I have a bunch of pages about Ninja Warrior Competitors, would it be OK to have these title tags?

James Mcgrath - American Ninja Warrior Competitor
Paul Kasemir - American Ninja Warrior Competitor
Chris Wilczewski - American Ninja Warrior Competitor
and so on...

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It won't harm in terms of penalties, but you would improve your listing (and possibly SEO) by giving each one a unique description about that specific page, otherwise Google are likely to ignore it and choose their own description from elsewhere on the page.

Google say:

Identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful when individual 
pages appear in the web results. In these cases we're less likely to display the 
boilerplate text. Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the 
specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation 
pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don't have time to create 
a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, 
create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/35624?rd=1#1

(It might be worth leaving it and seeing what they index, as there is a chance your descriptions are still unique enough. Change them if they choose their own.)

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  • I feel like the gray area is in how much is duplicate. I think I'm actually more concerned about the title tags. Can they be somewhat duplicate like I described as well? – etangins Jul 20 '14 at 15:48
  • The issue is exactly the same with title tags. It's not seen as spam, but Google may choose new ones if they think they are too similar. – RichardB Jul 20 '14 at 21:24
  • is there a way of telling how much can be similar? 75% 50% 10%? – etangins Jul 20 '14 at 22:52
  • I've never seen any experiments run, and Google don't say. Personally, I'd launch as you are and see what happens, rather than try and pre-empt them. – RichardB Jul 20 '14 at 23:15
  • Just to clarify, this won't help your "SEO" as the meta description is not a ranking factor. – zigojacko Jul 21 '14 at 8:57
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You won't get a penalty for near duplicate meta descriptions, or for near duplicate titles. But, regarding SEO efficiency, I would try to be as specific and unique for both to help users understand what your page is all about.

If you absolutely want to put 'Premiere American Ninja Warrior website for fans and competitors' on all your descriptions, I would put it at the end of them.

However, keep in mind that if Google (for example) does not like a description, it can/will create one of its own by selecting content on your page and override yours. It is likely to do so if all your descriptions look nearly the same.

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