Marcia - 6:27 pm on Mar 26, 2005 (gmt 0)

Templates are not dangerous. Using templates when you have little to no content on the pages using those templates can be.

And experience is the best teacher. :)

I'm looking at one of my own sites right now with 7 pages out of a total of 66 hand-rolled pages hit with URL only with one already out altogether (though it still shows PR, which has nothing to do with it).

It's *very* easy to look at all those pages with site: right now and see exactly why. With those, it's the percentage, or ratio, of what's unique main body content in relation to the weight of the content of the global template.

Not only that, but even with a decent paragraph or so of unique body text, there had better be a heavier balance of that text relative to the number of affiliate <a hrefs> on the page. Not that affiliate links are necessarily being hit, but by their nature they aren't unique.

There are two pages within that group, widgets.html and widgets-2.html that actually have enough unique text, BUT it appears there's *possibly* something else in operation. Just conjecture, but the extreme similarity in the filepath may be contributing to the problem with those, coupled with similarities on the page in spite of the unique text.

I say *possibly* because I couldn't state it for sure without it being verified by a second opinion or by more evidence - but the same thing happened with stuff.html and stuff-2.html - so it gives me a slight suspicion that groupings like that, closely linked with each other on the same site, could *possibly* need special attention to avoid problems, especially if there are structural similarities in the layout of the product display section.

Also, a couple of those pages that got hit in one particular section - that have pitiably little content on them aside from the global elements, are very poorly linked to from the rest of the site; they're only linked to from a page or two. No idea if that has any bearing, but it's another thing I'll be fixing.

Aside from this site of my own, I've just begun working with a site that has gotten most of the site in the supplemental index. Very LOW amount of main body content in relation to the global template, and excessive repetition in the filepaths besides. By the nature of the site, the remedy is to create several very content heavy pages with plenty of unique text and rely on those for ranking.

It's more than just duplication of text on pages, and Google is *very* good at picking up near duplicates, or maybe a kinder way to put it is to call them non-unique pages.

Added:

I had only one page go URL only on another site - and its got just a short introductory paragraph with links to other pages in the section. So even though they are not affiliate links, but links to other pages on the site, the ratio of characters in text vs. characters in links vs. the amount of characters in the global template elements isn't good enough to give the page "value" - speaking strictly from a user perspective.

I can't know for sure, of course, if that's really why that partcular page got hit, but there is no other reason except for what can be seen with the naked eye.