In the Supplemental due to index timing?

[pbaddock]

Ok - riddle me this SEO batmen :

While working on a client site, I noticed he had an awesome repository of content via about 30 magazine articles but he had them all stuffed into two pages (15 reviews a piece all with named anchors)....so the site structure went like this:

companyname.com/reviews.html (pretty icons and text links linking to various anchors on two monster review pages):
companyname.com/reviews2.html &
companyname.com/reviews3.html

....so thinking I was nice and clever, I split the articles into 30 pages with the goal of a) improving page rank through more pages of quality content, b) allowing various keywords in use in the articles to take greater prominence in the keyword density of the pages, and c) pickup more traffic through the long tail of search via niched keywords.

So far so good. I took about the next 10 days to tune the title's of all pages and I suspect a re-index took place as I notice that review url's ie companyname.com/name-of-the-review.html have been picked up in the index, but the title's remain the domain ie companyname.com.au which is what they were before I renamed them. I submitted a google sitemap to hopefully correct the title prob.

Also I noticed that despite the sitemap submission that re-indexing didn't happen completely in the next crawl ie it seemed to only update a few pages at a time.

BUT : and here's the thing that has me confused. The new /name-of-article.html pages are all in the supplemental index. Would this be because
1. the titles were common ie I didn't make them all unique when first creating the new pages
2. I've ommitted the description allowing google to make its own mind up based on page content (which I believe is ok ie description isn't critical? albeit I'm not controlling what the SE's present)
3. did the supplemental result occur because the old review2.html and review3.html may have still been in the index and therefore the article-name.html pages were deemed to be duplicate?
4. variations on all of hte above? (there are also a few dreamweaver tags in the html but they are html comments so I'm assuming not affecting things).

Also - any suggestions from here? (the titles are all unique now, no descriptions) - should I just wait it out? Will they come out of the supplemental of their own accord....should I be doing something to help that?

Sorry for the long rant, but this has me scratching my head a little....and while I can guess at possible causes, the timing of indexing of pages, is a bit confusing. I've done some searching, but haven't found a really good / accurate description of the timing of re-indexing of pages after a sitemap submission....can anyone post any good links?

[pbaddock]

oops - embarrassingly, I just tried some different search terms 'sitemap supplemental' where previously I was doing searches just on supplemental and re-inclusion, and I found a range of posts on sitemaps crippling sites due to highlighting any structural issues to google...I guess that's what I must have done. Suggestions seem to be to just delete the sitemap - thoughts all?

[pleeker]

This is not a direct answer to your second post, but....

One reason pages go supplemental is a lack of inbound links. I would assume these new pages have no IBLs, true?

Do you know about the previous pages, where all the articles were crammed onto 2-3 pages? Did those have a good IBL profile?

Something to consider.... (get the new pages some IBLs)

[pbaddock]

That's a good point, and something I hadn't contemplated directly. Having said that the reviews.html directory page should be sharing some link love with the individual this-review-name.html files after the restructure (as I changed all the anchors from reviews.html to point to the html files instead of reviews2.html#r29 etc) but that might not go far enough. Tks for the pointer - I'll ensure I work on some linking for these pages.

[Essex_boy]

Non individual meta tags can mess things up ive noticed from one of my sites that I play with, the duplicate content penalty shouldnt have kicked in as Google would have seen that the so suspected dup content is no longer around.

[pbaddock]

Further to this, I think the client suffered from use of Dreamweaver template definitions. They referred to a dreamweaver template .dwt file in their <head> section, and this had a <title> tag defined. I suspect (soon to be confirmed as I removed the <title> definition from the /templates/blah.dwt file) that this was causing <title> duplication on all the review files. I'll post again in a week or two to confirm, but I think there's some dreamweaver scullduggery at play here also.

[pbaddock]

ok - today google webmaster informed me that a crawl happened again a couple of days back. This was DEFINATELY after I added a) unique descriptions to all review pages, and b) removed the <title> definition in the Dreamweaver template.

The results are
1. all titles are still duplicated in the index yet when I view in the browser they are all unique (and I've double/tripled checked that the dreamweaver template has no <title> to be found in it anywhere ie all my <title>s are uniquely defined in each separate .html file.
2. all my reviews are still supplemental despite having unique meta titles, and descriptions.

I'm assuming at this point that the supplemental rating is some type of sandbox effect - they are all reviews of the same type of product but the reviews are all unique articles written by different people albeit similar product features might be mentioned.

Also - when a crawl happens, how many pages are crawled? It seems like barely any - and yet there are text links to all of the key pages via a html sitemap, and also some footer text links. Hmm think I'm back to trying to re-submit an xml sitemap again (in desperation?!). The site has around 40 pages of content - is it usual for this to not be indexed often? ....or for webmaster tools to claim a re-index was done, but no titles updated etc?