1000s of Supplemental Results for the SAME Page

Google indexing problem

[benc007]

I have a page called ABC.asp where the pages indexed are:

ABC.asp?Id=1
ABC.asp?Id=4234
ABC.asp?Id=99203

site:www.site.com -inurl:www.site.com inurl:ABC

I get almost 1K supplemental results for this page, and I am pretty sure the problem is that all of these pages have the SAME description meta tag. Has anyone else seen this as well?

[tedster]

"Pages" is not a technical term -- Google indexes urls, and these are separate urls. Yes, this is a common issue for sites. If the content of those urls is all identical, I suggest finding a way to exclude those extra query strong versions from Google's indexing.

The issue is that those urls might all represent unique content, so search engines will look at each issue. If this goes on to an extreme degree, you may lose your regular listings, too. Can you programtically add a meta robots noindex tag to the head section if there is a query string?

[benc007]

How did you revive pages that were previously in Google's supplmental index? I am having this problem with having the same description meta tag for all instances of a page, ABC.asp

ABC.asp is counted as supplemental for each instance.

eg.

ABC.asp?Id=126
ABC.asp?Id=23432
ABC.asp?Id=33

If I change the description tag so that it is unique, will G remove these pages from the supplemental index? Do I have to email them to do this?

I am also in the process of finishing a project that rewrites the ABC.asp page from:

ABC.asp?Id=126 into ABC_126.asp
ABC.asp?Id=23432 into ABC_23432.asp
ABC.asp?Id=33 into ABC_33.asp

and the old ABC.asp?Id=someNumber will return a 302 Object moved status. What do you think? I can programatically change the META description tag so all pages have a different tag.

[benc007]

"I'm also seeing more thin content pages (100 words or less) ending up in the supplemental index, irregardless of title/meta description. So to be on the safe side, on top of tuning your title/metas I'd also beef up word count on every page." - Halfdeck

This page does not have a lot of content (limit of 500 characters for the main section of the page). Do you think this is moreso the problem than the duplicate META description tag across all instances of this page (regardless of the Id parameter in the querystring)?

[gdawg]

Hopefully, you really are not using the variable "id" in your urls. Google specifically says not to do this in their webmaster guidelines. "Don't use "&id=" as a parameter in your URLs, as we don't include these pages in our index"

[tedster]

Just for clarity, it's "ampersand"+"id=" that Google proscribes. There are plenty of urls in the index with a simple "id" but no "&" in the front.

Still, it is much better not to use "id" at all, IMO

[benc007]

"Just for clarity, it's "ampersand"+"id=" that Google proscribes. There are plenty of urls in the index with a simple "id" but no "&" in the front."

Yes that is why we are moving toward this? Any comments on my questions above?

[tedster]

In the past 6-8 months, duplicate meta decription tags have been the source of many Supplemental issues. Either have no meta description tag at all and let Google raid the content for a ransom note, or make the description tags page specific.

500 characters is not a lot of on page content, but if it is, say 70% to 80% unique, that can still be enough. In that situation a unique meta description can often fix the problem.

[benc007]

If I changed the duplicate meta description tags, would G remove these pages from the Supplemental Index?

If ABC.asp page is rewritten as the following, would this be better or should I only change the meta description tag and leave the rewrite for later?

ABC.asp?Id=126 into ABC_126.asp
ABC.asp?Id=23432 into ABC_23432.asp
ABC.asp?Id=33 into ABC_33.asp

and the old ABC.asp?Id=someNumber returns a 302 Object moved status.

[trinorthlighting]

Are these session id's? If they are you will have a serious issue down the road.

[jimbeetle]

[quqote]and the old ABC.asp?Id=someNumber will return a 302 Object moved status[/quqote]

A 302 is a temporary redirect and really won't do much of anything. Better to make it a 301 permanent redirect.

[benc007]

"Are these session id's? If they are you will have a serious issue down the road."

- No these are not session Ids.

"A 302 is a temporary redirect and really won't do much of anything. Better to make it a 301 permanent redirect."

- How is a 301 better than a 302 for the search engines?

[g1smd]

With a 301 redirect, the URL that issues the redirect will be delisted, and the URL that the redirect points to will be indexed with the content found at that location.

That is exactly what you want to happen.

A 302 does not enable that to happen. Use only the 301 redirect. Check that it really is a 301 by using a HTTP header checker.

Oh, and make sure that all of your new URLs are entirely in lower case. You really do not want to have duplicate content issues where a page is indexed multiple times with mixed case URLs. Don't even go there.

[edited by: g1smd at 10:09 pm (utc) on June 23, 2006]

[jonathannelson]

benc007 -

check out this thread for more on what 301 permanent redirects are, how to implement them, and what they mean to search engines:

[webmasterworld.com...]

basic implementation: [webconfs.com...]

Jonathan

[Halfdeck]

As already been said, I would first generate unique meta description and title for each page. Not using a meta description tag can land you in a mess depending on your page layout. I may also get rid of id using 301s, though I doubt that's the reason why your pages are supplemental. After that's done, I'd work on beefing up page text. Some of my 10 words or less test pages are starting to turn supplemental, which is one reason I believe high word count helps, although if your meta tags are identical, even a 1000 words page will still probably end up supplemental. Don't forget to do some linkbuilding to encourage Google to deep crawl.