Meta Description Tag A Way Out Of Google Supplemental Index?
December 2, 2006 – 11:49 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The Google Supplemental Index seems to be growing larger everyday, and that’s one trend I don’t want to follow. Let’s just say, in the long run, you’re better off having your pages out of the Supplemental Index and in the “real index” where we all know they truly belong. This discussion is coming up more and more and it looks like Google is encouraging the use of the tag.
More and more people are having trouble with pages landing in the Supplemental Index, so Vanessa Fox of Google tells the webmaster:
Looking at your site in the search results, it appears that your pages would be well served by meta description tags. For most queries, the generated snippet is based on where the query terms are found on the page, and in those cases, your results are fine. But for some more generic queries, where a logical snippet isn’t found in the text, the generated snippet seems to be coming from the first bits of text from the page — in this case, boilerplate navigation that is the same for every page.
Checking on a couple of websites of mine that have had intermittent problems with being supplemental, and with ranking, I see the snippets are being grabbed, in large part, from the boilerplate navigation. I know I removed the meta description tags at one point, although the reason eludes me now. I decided today to go ahead and add them back to see what happens.
I’m thinking with the nearly direct encouragement for the one webmaster to add it, that it’s probably a decent practice to use in all cases. Luckily for experimental purposes, the affected pages aren’t cached, so I should be able to see the snippet change pretty fast, and hopefully I can observe and determine if any improvements happen.
Individual meta tags might be one more path to get yourself out of the Supplemental Index.
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4 Responses to “Meta Description Tag A Way Out Of Google Supplemental Index?”
Many people wind up in the supplemental because the title and description tags are all the same. I covered this in my podcast today. This is one of the most common reasons why people end up in the supplemental. It usually happens because people just never change the tags when creating pages.
By Mr SEO on Dec 2, 2006
True. Not all out the box popular CMS’s have meta tags either. I notice on Wordpress they’re disabled by default.
This is one easy way for me to track this factor. I’m just doing the obvious, going back in and seeing what I have wrong, before spending all the time bitching about Google.
At least Vanessa Fox was clear in her post.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 3, 2006
I to have recently been plagued with this, despite the fact that all the pages in my site utilise unique meta tags (kw desc).
I think Google has had a real foul up of late with the supplemental results. I was seeing article pages for example being listed in the serps and being flagged as supplemental. The funny thing that leads me to think google cocked up, was the fact that under each supplemetal result, the meta description tag had been repeated betwen 2-5 times depending on its length!
very freaky.
By Justin Kercher on Dec 5, 2006
I think the site: command may just be wonky.
But I’m triple-checking everything anyways.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 6, 2006