Omitted results - meta descriptions not displayed

Hi,

When Google first picked up my site each page had the same description meta tag and I think therefore didn't see the pages as unique. The site has since been updated so each page has a unique meta description. All page titles are also unique.

I've also uploaded a Google Sitemap but after a few weeks my site still gets the search result with

"In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included."

When displaying the omitted results they haven't had the descriptions updated. How can I update so these are now seen as unique with the correct descriptions?

TIA,

Adrian

The short and simple answer. As with almost anything search, the answer could be more complex

Time; and
Build quality back links.

This will typicall address this issue.

As gchaney says, the answer could be more complex.

The meta description alone wouldn't be enough to mark the pages as duplicate - Google takes all the on-page factors into account.

You can't force Google to update a page - it will do it in its own time based on the link strength to your site, the frequency of page updates, and whether the pages are in the primary or supplemental index. Supplemental pages are crawled less frequently than those in the primary index.

Unfortunately, in the same way that the meta description alone is unlikely to be the reason for most/all of these pages going supplemental, changing it won't be enough to put them into the primary index. For that, as gchaney says, you need more links to your site, and if possible deep links to these pages.

Also take an objective look at the pages and ask yourself if there's any other aspects of them that would be cause for Google to put them in the supplemental index. Sometimes there isn't, and it's simply a case of not enough link juice, but often the on page factors can be improved.

Also, if any of these pages are important it might be worth linking to them directly from the homepage to give them the necessary link juice.

Thanks very much for your help guys.

Adrian

cud u post up the URL to have a better view of whats wrong..? If no, then follow the above posts,, eventually, as the time passes things will settle down then.

Hi,

Thanks for your reply. Actually I just tried to post the URL for you and got the message,

"We are sorry, new user accounts are not permitted to create posts containing URLs."

I'm happy to send it to you privately if you agree.

Many thanks for your help.

A

If you post the url as mysite dot com you won't have a problem.

Thank you. Yes, I didn't want to be flamed for posting a URL as a newbie. But if you don't mind here you go:

whichgiftshop dot co dot uk

TIA,

A

Hi nairda,

Welcome to SeoChat

Right now I see that Google have indexed 97 pages from your site and don't show any supplemental results.

Most of the listings feature your current descriptions and there are very few duplicates, so I guess your initial problem is solved!

One small thing you should address is to change your onsite "Home Page" links - just have them point to the domain root and remove the "index.html"

Other than that - keep looking for incoming links and improving your site content and you should do ok.

Hi ClickyB,

Thank you, it's a very helpful forum

Thanks very much for your advice, it's much appreciated.

How are you finding out the indexed pages? If I search for 'whichgiftshop' and check the omitted results most of these have the old descriptions. The pages built using Wordpress (in the DISCOUNT CODES & PROMOS section of the site) and being picked up quickly however.

That's an interesting point about the onsite 'home page' links. Out of interest what is the advantage of not using index.html? Is it just better for search engines and why only the home page - should I use absolute links for the other pages to include the domain name?

Thanks again,

Adrian

Just use the following query: site:www . whichgiftshop . co .uk and you´ll see all the pages that Google has indexed from your domain. It´s 116 at the moment.

Hi Adrian,
As Seo Madrid said - I searched Google for site:www.whichgiftshop.co.uk and saw 97 pages (exact results will differ from place-to-place and from time-to-time).

With regard to the internal links, absolute Vs local links is a different issue (but out of interest I always use absolute links because I do a lot of work in adult industry where stolen content is rife and absolute urls just makes it more difficult to steal my site and duplicate it quickly), the issue for you is link dilution.

With your homepage url it can have 4 possible urls:
1. www.yoursite.co.uk
2. yoursite.co.uk
3. www.yoursite.co.uk/index.html
4.yoursite.co.uk/index.html
Forget trailing slash versions... that makes no difference)

When you build links (external or internal) to a page, it's best to concentrate all links to one url; otherwise it's possible for Google to see multiple urls with identical content and for your incoming "link juice" to be divided amongst the urls (thus diluting the strength and increasing the possibility of duplicate content issues).

(Note: The "www" issue is known as "canonical" and Google have become much better at dealing with it BUT they still mess up sometimes)

There are some simple ways that you can remove all possibilities of confusion/error/dilution, so it makes sense to do so right?

All of these things can be fixed using .htaccess / iis redirects (depending on your server type and host options) but that's not always easy for people to deal with.

One of the simplest/quickest things you can do to help is to make sure all internal links point to the same url... The best one is the domain root because that's the one most external links will also point to.

I see that you are running your site on an apache server so - assuming you can edit your .htaccess file - I will also tell you how to use .htaccess to remove any possibility of link dilution:

To redirect all traffic and links using your domain name without the "www" you can add the following lines to your domain root .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whichgiftshop.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.whichgiftshop.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

To redirect all traffic and links from "whichgiftshop/index.html" to "whichgiftshop/" add these lines:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

If you want to do both - just add this:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^whichgiftshop.co.uk
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.whichgiftshop.co.uk/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /.*index\.html\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(.*)index\.html$ /$1 [R=301,L]

If you do that you'll find that you don't actually need to change your homepage links because they will redirect to the domain root (although - being a pedantic type - I would change them anyway)

Hi ClickyB,

Apologies for the delay in thanking you for such a helpful response, it's been a very hectic week! Anyway thanks so much for this. I've just had my first venture into creating a .htaccess file (not being too technical with a little help from my hosting company!) and it is almost there. I've used the lines of code to do both and these URLs are now working and redirecting correctly:

http://www.whichgiftshop.co.uk/index.html
http://whichgiftshop.co.uk/

This isn't working:

http://whichgiftshop.co.uk/index.html

Should this be working or do you think I've made an error?
I'm similar to you so I think I'll still change the homepage links to http://www.whichgiftshop.co.uk :-)

Thanks again for your help, it's much appreciated!

Adrian

Hi again,

I think that's working now, so all is looking good :-)

Many thanks,

Adrian