Originally published on headlark.com .

Docs sites grow by copying pages. A new section starts as a copy of an old one, every product area gets an "Overview" and a "Configuration" page, and the framework fills in whatever the front matter leaves out. The result is dozens of pages that tell search engines the same thing in their <title> and <meta name="description"> .

Google asks for a distinct description per page and descriptive, concise titles ( Google Search Central: snippets , title links ). When fifty pages share one description, Google writes its own snippet from the page text, and search results for your docs look alike, so people have a harder time picking the right page.

Where the duplicates come from

Docusaurus

Each doc's description comes from its description front matter. Without it, Docusaurus uses the first line of Markdown content as the description ( docs front matter ).…