Hello again my Smith Cart friends!

Let me first qualify the subject question with how I even considered it's purpose at all. I have google analytics currently crawling my site on a weekly basis. Under the Potential HTML improvements section, I am seeing that Google is considering each page with a "?categoryid=" tag added to the URL to be its own unique page, and as such, is saying that each one of these pages has a duplicate "title" tag and "description" tag. Now, this fact may not be hurting my SEO potential, but it certainly is not helping it.

Then the thought hit me, maybe Smith Cart has already accounted for this, and I'm missing something. I remembered that each category you create has a "category name and description" tied to it. I thought to myself, "certainly this is how Smith Cart is giving unique title and description tags to these automatically generated category pages".

I tried updating a few, and using a SERP emulator tool to see if it would changed how google would see the page. Unfortunately, the category name and description seem to have no effect on the page's title and description tags, and the generated category pages are still just pulling their tags from the parent page.

However, I have not yet given up hope. Maybe it takes a while to update, or there is something I'm missing to enable this feature, as I can see no other purpose for Smith Cart giving me the option to have a "Category Description".

I am using a custom built menu, and not the category module for users to navigate my store. Could this be the reason? Any insights guys?

Two example pages can be viewed at
https://www.yandasmusic.com/Guitar/El...
https://www.yandasmusic.com/Guitar/El...


Thanks for all your help - 
Alex

I'll do that, thanks for the heads up Kevin.

It would be a cool feature for us to be able to control the page tags for product category pages dynamically, just like we have on the products themselves. That way, google can properly index category pages for increased search results. Let me know if it's ever in the works!

Alex

Thanks for this heads up Scott. I must admit that I am relatively new to SEO, and you can bet that I will very soon be adding category url keywords and descriptions to all my pages. However, from what I have read, the title tag is relatively important from an SEO standpoint, and pages that lack them receive lower rankings.

I think I also read that if you page lacks a title tag, google will scan the page and look for a relevant title to give it. I could use the category description feature and add a H1 tagged text to each category page, in hopes that google will latch on to that tag as the title. I will definitely be doing this.

But, correct me if I'm wrong, a generated title tag is not equivalent to an assigned title tag, and therefore, receives lower rankings?