fatinfo.com

The free web directory was stuck in Google supplemental index where all the pages appeared to be duplicate content in the eyes of the search engine. Although each category contained different websites, it was still not enough to differentiate a health category from a shopping category and eventually led to the drop of pagerank on the internal pages. It was very frustrating, because one way or another - the categories have to come out from the supplemental index in order to be a successful directory.

Basically, all the pages needed additional on-page optimization to get re-included as the regular index. All the categories got rewritten meta description and keyword tags. That was key. Unless your website has a PR 9, you need these metatags and they need to be unique. In addition to getting the categories out, the detail pages of each submission were facing the same problems. Now who can write unique keywords for every submission? Definitely not us, so we created a mod to generate automatic keywords based on the description text provided by the submitter. You can find the blog using search or the archives. So far it is working wonders, each detail page is getting picked up by the regular listing and some are ranking well.

Bottom line is that unique meta tags can and will get your web pages out of Google’s supplemental results. View our improved search results and decide for yourself.

Sometimes, search engines do need a little help in determining what the pages are about when they are overwhelmed by repetitive text that are mainly top navigation menu links before it can get to the actual content. You can auto generate the description meta tags by grabbing the first 200 characters of the content, thus the robots will already know what the page is about before it encounters the menu link text and get lost. Even with something so simple, often a lot of websites will not have these meta tags (Fatinfo WAS very guilty of this also) or have the same description and keyword tags on all the pages. Currently we are applying the same concept to get other web sites out of the Google supplemental index and hope to see similar success in the next week or two.

Update 09/29/2006: Google stuck the directory results back into the supplemental index. This has me really perplexed considering I had added unique meta tags to every category path and only listed sites considered to be relevant to those categories. When I study other directories with empty categories and no meta tags, they have everything going for them including properly assigned Google pagerank. Basically the Google supplemental really stinks for directories stuck in supplemental. Thank goodness the root has PR and keeps the submission traffic flowing steadily.

Update 10/09/2006: I truely hope this is the last update to this particular blog entry, because the web directory categories are no longer displayed as Google supplemental in the search results. If this holds true for another month, then we can conclude that unique meta tags does make search engines work better in overcoming the indexing of similar navigation text before reaching the actual contents of the page. One other note worth mentioning is that applying this same concept into a store with products has returned pagerank to its internal pages as well. Many of its results are no longer displayed as supplemental results, thank goodness there are always ways to help the Google bot work better.