What text does a search engine read?

[tomynate]

My site is a dynamic html shopping cart and seemingly works fine, but I am having a tough time with text. I don't know what is or is not seen by search engines. I have several categories and sub categories of products. If I try to put text relating to the entire site on the index page because of tables it will be a mile long so I have tried to keep it simple. I have category pages I can link to from the index page and can put additonal text on them as well as sub category pages. I also have a site map. All of my product pages are html so they have their own titles and meta tages. The category and sub cat pages do not. When I look at the source code of these pages it is the same as the index page. So I am wondering if the search engine looks at them the same as the index page. In other words, does the search engine look at all the text on these pages to support the key words? I did a meta tag analyzer through Submit Express and when it came to keywords it said "Keyword relevancy to page content is terrible. The keywords relevancy to page content is 4%." Looking at just the index page this is no doubt true. So I'm thinking that if this is the case with what Submit Express used to test my site then search engines will be the same. Need some help here please.

[tomynate]

If in Google you see the words "Supplemental Results" next to your listing, that is bad. That means the page probably had some duplicate content or was too similar to your other pages and it is being filtered out.

Thanks for your response. I'm not sure I understand this. I have looked at several pages. I have not seen any that say supplemental results. I saw several that said "similar pages". Can you point me to some particular page.

[Hagens]

Same here. I tried that with the www.hagensfish.com website, and i think google might be blocking a page. It still comes up in searches, but google's last snapshot of the page was over a month ago.

I've made relevent changes since then, and I would think that they would have a new copy by now. Also, I didn't happen to see 'Supplemental Results' next to anything either... tho, on the page in question, I wouldn't be suprised to find out that this is the problem.

BTW, thanks to anyone thats given me help through this site. My rankings are getting up there, i'm still using 'NoteTab' for all my editing, and everything else is moving in a forward direction!

[Hagens]

Sorry... I should clerify.

Google IS indexing our home page and through my improvments, my ranking is climbing. However... ONE of my subpages don't seem to be getting cached by google. I think the version they have is from Feb 3rd (or something close). My 'home' page is being indexed just fine.

Does google even put any major emphasis on sub pages? Or do they just update 'their' subpage index a few times a year?