Interesting observations Mia. Gosh it's a pretty shit algo if duplicate meta tags could be the downfall of a site. How many CMS's just use the same meta tags on every page. Matt Cutt's says it is not on the list of priorities, but how isn't it when sites with good content are being hit with supplementals!
I have thousands of pages that are in supp. All have unique meta tags. Unique content is definately the key to not get into supp. Another thing, meta tags are on their way out, if they are not out already. Meta keyword IS out. And thats logical also, why should the robots look at something different than the users ? makes no sense.
That is the same question I keep asking myself. How/why is it happening. Again, to sites that have completely unique content?
Trying unsuccessfully to get out of supplemental since more than one year. Nothing seems to work, and wildcards and other methods suggested by Google area are not accepted once you are using its removal console.
A few months back I made some changes to my website, including a 301 redirect from the www version to the non-www and I added metatags to my page headers. I thought the redirect was my problem for a while, because soon after the change, my PageRank dropped from a 5 to a 1. Now I realize that all but one of my 1300 indexed pages are in supplemental due to the metatags being the same! Basically, my site is demolished. I just removed the meta keywords from all headers. Do you think I should remove the metatags altogether? How long does it generally take to recover?
Well, the script I'm using, IndexScript, had an update that allows for changing of meta descriptions for each category. While it didn't solve all of my problems, it did for a large number. I'm hoping in time it will better. Another method that I use is multiple blogs, that use different anchor text to link to different categories in my directory. That way the spider map isn'tthe only thing linking to a page.
I had a site that was in supplemental for a long time. Site has about 80 pages, all different, all manual HTML (no PHP/auto generated meta tags etc) and unique. I changed all the meta tags to be completely different, and moved the menu code to the bottom of the HTML, and that didn't work. Then I remembered that each page also had a header strip containing the same five word sentence as a <p> being the description of the site. I changed them, and within a few days the site was out of supplemental. Coincidence possibly (I have a different site which is still completely supplemental) but I think you need to ensure that there is almost nothing at all in common in the part of the file before the main text starts. Relatively easy with 80 HTML pages, not so easy with 10,000 PHP pages.
I hope it may help when you place external links on internal sections os your site Also I heard very interesting idea 1) temporarily remove your site pages from google (use metatag noindex) 2) then addd it again (remove metatag noindex)
If that is helping it means that there are bug in google making them to not index your site correctly the first time. I dont think it is so, and if it is, it will not last long.
I think the meta descriptions are the ones you want to worry about - ie meta keywords being the same aren't that much of a problem. After changing meta descriptions on an original content site (a poetry site), it took a few days and no more supplemental pages. I think it's a good way for webmasters to know 'something's wrong' with pages - although it would be nicer to know exactly what was wrong. -kpaul
Nodewords module will let you add them to each node. For dynamically generated ones, though, i think you'll need the phptemplate engine. Then go into your page.tpl.php file and include the title variable in the meta description maybe. I think there may be one or two other drupal mods, but i don't know what they are off hand. -kpaul
Ok, I've got it. Simply having the same "Title" tag WILL get you into supplemental results. Something is not very right in Google Land!
what do you mean by title tag being the same? look at my site, all the pages have unique title tags www.0-apr-creditcards.com
I had unique titles. I however had redundant metas. I made the changes to the metas and doctored the titles and was out of supplemental in less then a week. Nothing I did prior to that helped. The reason I'm so certain it worked is that I tested this on one certain section of the website. That section immediatly apeared in the SERPS as a regular listing. I followed suit on all sections and the indexed pages are going up daily and the a G crawler is back eating daily whereas before, I thought I had cooties and never saw it.
http://store.mccoypottery.com by no means a made for adsense or spam site. It is a legit ecommerce site, stuck in supplemental results. The metas are not the problem. There ARE NONE. The content on each page is unique. There are no duplicate products. The ONLY thing that is the same, page to page is the Title: "McCoyPottery.Com Online Store - McCoy Cookie Jars, Gifts and More" is the man title for the site and each category/sub category. However, each individual product page is: McCoyPottery.Com Online Store - Todays Date. All of these pages, as well as anything in the cat/sub cat are supplemental. WHY?
We had a converstaion like this this morining or last night here. Another guy asked the same question. He too had no metas. If you fail to see G uses them and want to be stubborn and leave them off, I think you are biting your nose off to spite your face. :/