Thank you, but I believe the most important factor to be a page's Page Rank, which is why I said "several factors are at influence, with the strongest being any external links in" As generally a link into a page will be enough to give it some thing to stay out of Supplemental. "then internal page rank distribution and then the uniqueness of each page." As it happens, I'm softening to the position of mvandemar with regard to page rank being the sole factor. Nonetheless keeping each page title, and meta tags unique and relevant is a factor in the pages ranking independent of the Supplemental Index and should be practiced regardless.
Absolutely... please note guys, I'm not saying that there aren't other problems with duplicate content, or that I have any idea what effect it will have on other search engines... I'm only saying it doesn't cause supps, and the only reason I'm saying it is to try and help people avoid wasting efforts on something that isn't going to matter anyways. -Michael
sorry it is while, missed the thread answers. in reference to my point on the same title and tags etc. my understanding of the supp index is that the pages do not have enough value to be indexed properly. one of the main causes is duplication, another being hardly any content, another being no links. there is not one single solution here but there are some no no's. the no no's for me are duplicating the tags and titles. as someone has mentioned, it is not the single solution to remove but is definately a reason they are in there. if a page has unique tags, title, content and some back links and some good internal linking then it should not be in supplemental. those who are frantically changing tags and expecting a result tomorrow, this is very unlikely to happen, as with most SEO stuff, you need to follow the basics and do them all to avoid some of the issues. if you have struggling pages then do a bottom up review of your site. there was a comment about Aaron Wall earlier, a lot of SEO is about opinion or interpretation of guidelines. Aaron has some very good stuff but he differs to someone like Matt Cutts or Dan Theis on certain things. Who is right? Who is wrong?
That in a nutshell is why I love SEO. You can experiment, get some data via results & hopefully logical inference and come up with theories as to the hows and whys of getting something to rank and how to deal with special circumstances such as the Supplemental Index. However no two sites are the same - no two pages are the same - and so we may get different conclusions from the evidence & experience gathered. I don't know how many times I've thought I've discovered the "secret sauce" only to have the same technique do nothing on another site.
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