How to robots respond to *very similar* descriptions and keywords

How to individualize metas on similar content pages?

[Lifesnadir]

I'm a novice - started August 15th knowing nothing of html. I want to do my pages as best as I can do them, but I have 2 websites that are challenging on descriptions and keywords.

My 2 websites have many very similar pages.

Will google & robots ignore the majority of my pages if my meta description and meta keywords are very similar or exactly the same on over 100 pages?

Also, google is not yet picking up the 2 home pages, but IS picking up one 1818 page of newspapers.... I don't understand this.... Is there a reason? Or does Google only pick random pages on websites that are brand new? All my pages are named differently, but often are in a series by year-dates from the 1800s to the 1900s. Google IS picking up ONE page based on my name (of over 100 pages)--why doesn't it show all? (It doesn't even show "similar pages" on searches.)

Is there anything I can do to make these sites stand out while keeping the tags written well? Both webs are packed with unique content...and I've put all through w3's link-checker & most through w3's validator (and working on the rest).

Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'm really curious to know if my description & keywords are ok even if duplicated so closely, or if I need to re-work those.

Thanks.

[edited by: mona at 11:33 pm (utc) on Nov. 30, 2005]
[edit reason] No specifc KW phrases -thx! [/edit]

[webdude]

Just my 2 cents and I am often wrong, but I have had success with making sure the title tag and the meta description is different for each page. Of course the content should be too. I had a site that was very similar to yours where the description was the same on every page. I rewrote all the descriptions and about 3 months later, all the pages ended up in the index, including the home page.

This might have something to do with the dupe penalty.

You might want to use Google Sitemaps too. I have had relatively good success with this, especially for forum pages.

[ogletree]

I said this in another thread and I think it bears repeating here.

"Don't worry about meta kw and meta description. If you are finished getting links and adding content then you can spend some time working on that. There is always something else you could spend your time on that has more benefit. Don't waste your time. "

[Lifesnadir]

Thank you Ogletree & Webdude for your replies. I might do a test and change some to see what happens to the search results.

Thanks again,

Judy