Meta Descriptions - How Unique From One Another?

[Spry]

Lets say you are building a site on poker bonus codes and are writing your meta descriptions.

How unique do your meta descriptions need to be from one another? Each would be unique but only somewhat so as they are all related to bonus codes. Does it matter if each description is similar to other descriptions found throughout the site with just a few variables changed?

For example:

Meta Desc: Use pokersite bonus code blabla to claim the max bonus possible at pokersite.

And they you would just change the words in italics for each page.

Does google care as long as your description is unique and describes what is on the page?

All content on the page is unique and professionally written, just the meta titles are similar to one another...

[OPC]

That might set off dup. flags... If you're going to use something that closely related, you might wish to also have a short, compelling lead-in for each one (i.e. - Learn how to use..., When you utilize, etc...)

[Mark]

I've used similar meta description tags for different pages just replacing the poker room name as you mentioned, and haven't seen any adverse effects from it.

Mark

[Michael Martinez]

There is really nothing wrong with duplicate content. The biggest duplicate content issue you'll find at Google is that they kick in an Omitted Results filter if they decide too many pages are similar to each other.

I've observed that the Omitted Results filter can be incurred if your page titles, meta descriptions, and page URLs are very similar. You need at least some variation in page titles and meta descriptions.

For most Web sites, this is a complete non-issue, as most sites don't optimize all their pages for a single keyword. Having page titles and meta descriptions that are very similar indicates the pages are underoptimized and thus not realizing their full potential in the search indexing.

That's not an issue of "duplicate content is hurting me" but rather an issue of "I'm NOT doing enough with my pages to target the expressions those pages are most relevant to".

You should not need 20 pages about the same topic on your site, but if you do have 20 pages for a topic then each page should focus on a sub-topic within that topic -- reflecting that focus in its page title and meta description.

If you have unique content on every page and don't have the means to create a call-to-action in every meta description, try grabbing the first unique sentence from each page.