Originally Posted by Aspectart

I have a site that is listed in the supplemental index in Google. I've decided it's finally time to do something about it, but I get varying pieces of advice from people, and in the end it seems no-one really knows what has happened.

So can anyone help me out, and let me know what I need to do?

Theories so far:
1) All my meta tags, and page titles are the same (site was built using a template)
2) I have lots of content from the encyclopedia Brittanica
3) The site is in the "sandbox"
4) I did something that's been viewed as spammy
5) I don't have enough inbound links
6) Only Google knows the answer.
7) All of the above

well, I know I need to deal with 1), but this is more of an SEO thing and would not lead things to being supplemental so I'm told. The 2) should only affect the pages where there is duplicated text if this was the problem. 3) the site is 2 years old, and IS listed in Google. 4) Maybe, as I used to have some random link exchanges in the past, but these have since been removed (Google still has the old link pages in their cache though). 5) this would only effect ranking surely, and have nothing to do with being listed as supplemental. 6) Probably, but as they don't answer questions like this not much help. 7) it may well that the effect is amplified because of a number of things I've done wrong.

Any help would be very gratefully received.