based on the fact that G puts you into the supplemental results for having the same meta keywords and/or description in pages... what would happen if i completely got rid of meta tags/descriptions altogether?
This has been discussed previously several times. Most people believe that meta tags are dead, but there are tons of small search engines and directories that index your site based on your meta tags. Furthermore, I have seen my sites listed by Google and other major search engines using my meta tags as descriptions, so how they can say meta tags are dead?
google puts sites in teh supplemental results for having the same keywords/descriptions. the question is whether or not this will happen if they have no meta keywords/descriptions. my site has had 9000+ pages put in the supplemental results since launch about 3 months ago. in fact the only page not in the supplemental results is my homepage. all of these pages have had the same keywords/descriptions simply because its implausible to write seperate keywords/descriptions for all of those pages.
I think just removing meta will not change that, if you can write seperate meta for each page, it might help.
I would not get rid of the description tags. I would make them unique to that page though. A three month old site would have trouble getting all pages to be indexed anyhow. Are those 9000+ pages all unique (not copied from elsewhere)? You don't need the keywords tags for google, but MSN still takes notice. There too though: they have to be unique, or they won't matter. On the value of metatags
The title tag is important for ranking. The description tag is important for getting people to click on your link. The keywords tag is important for getting adsense targeted on a page that has very little textual content.
From what Ive seen title and description are very important.. Google seems to love a nice Title So Im keeping meta for now.....
yeah title tag definetely is important, theres no question of getting rid of that. yes the content is 100% unique - the only problem is that the main part of the site (xoog.net) is a big photo gallery and Google may be struggling differentiating one page from another - however it does explain why a lot of other pages havent been indexed. i might keep the description for the pages, whilst getting rid of the keywords... as adsense is only used on the content pages of the site.
I have pages on one site that is nothing but photographs and a tiny amount of verbiage and they get a big, fat PR0. If I were to add a 200 word unique introduction to each page then I would probably get ranked. But, then that verbiage would take away from the page. Your call!
In the case of photographs, make sure each picture has it's own title-tag or alt-tag that is unique. It is also a good idea to get each picture its own appropriate filename (not picture123445.jpg). If it's user generated, make the title people give the picture be the alt-text or something. And make it easy for them to add comments, the way myspace does.
I agree with this. But of course, the description tag is not always used (depending on the content of your page).
Actually page description tags are used and getting rid of them will hurt your rankings and your pages will still be in supplementals. Supplemental index is designed to store pages which are not likely to be shown for a user search query. Now if you have 1000s of pages of 95% same content then there is no need for Google to carry more than one page of your site in the main index. Its just common sense. Basically this is what allows Google to return results in nano seconds. If you have indexing problems you can submit an xml or ror sitemap to Google. https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools/docs/en/about.html However the way Google indexes, is they will pick up a few pages at a time, they are in no rush to index everything a webmaster publishes. So a site with 100s or 1000s of pages, may not see all pages indexed for 6 months to a year or more. Go with per page titles & descriptions at the least.