Comments on: Google’s Supplemental Results – SEO Tip Week 29

By: bill

bill — Tue, 27 May 2008 18:55:41 +0000

When a page is launched Google does an analysis of the page which includes a series of unique qualifiers in different algorithms to determine which index the page will be placed in, the page rank, and the keyword set it will be ranked for. I believe content uniqueness and quality is what Google uses first to determine which index to place the page in.

You have about a month of to get quality links to it:

In about a month Google implements a second analysis for inbound links from quality sites to determine if it will keep it in the index. If a page has no links coming to it, Google assumes the content is not what people might be searching for or is not popular, and there is a strong possibility that it will be put in the supplemental index.

Getting Pages Out Of the Supplemental:

Once a page is placed in the supplemental index the quickest way to get it to the primary index is to build QUALITY links to the page from other pages both internal and external.

By: Shell Harris

Shell Harris — Sun, 29 Jul 2007 02:42:29 +0000

I can give you tip that I did for a pet site of mine, Smoothie Recipes. I had the same problem, about 95% of my pages were supplemental. I did three specific steps which helped dramatically. I have over 300 recipes on the site, but I have almost 100 pages in the normal index, a huge increase. Here are the tasks I did which I think really helped: I started pointing links to some interior pages (recipes) by using a random post plugin. It places random post links on every page. I created a most popular blog post page, such is on this site as well if you look in the top nav. This also creates nice links to old posts and helps show visitors what is popular. And finally I made sure all my pages have a different meta description. Try these tactics and let me know how it works for you. Good luck!

By: Some Guy

Some Guy — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 22:38:16 +0000

I had a bunch of pages in the supplemental index and assumed it was due to WordPress’ structure. I created a good robots.txt, optimized titles, created 301 redirects. Slowly – slowly – google began properly excluding pages in accordance with the robots.txt file – but still, several weeks later, my supplemental count is horrible – sometimes 90%. I guess it just takes a really long time to shake them out.

By: Shell Harris

Shell Harris — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:47:59 +0000

Using a 301 permanent redirect is this safe and wise choice here. Sometimes you can do a 302 in the beginning and the change to a 301 after the new page gains popularity, but I’d just do the 301 and move on.

By: Kirkwood

Kirkwood — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 20:37:31 +0000

If you delete the old pages and rename them, should you 301/302 them for those who do happen to stumble onto them? Or would that just keep them stuck in the supl. ??

By: Chris Alexander

Chris Alexander — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 17:23:44 +0000

Hello WordPress Guru,

That is a problem many blogs face.

I’ve seen some large blogs with 90% of their indexed pages be in the supplemental results index. There used to be a method for easily checking your supplemental pages vs. main indexed pages in Google, but Google seems to have stopped that functionality.

A site search on your domain shows 44 pages indexed & by my count 15 of those are in the supplemental index. That’s a pretty good ratio.

By: WordPress Guru Advice

WordPress Guru Advice — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:29:57 +0000

The duplicate content issue is what keeps me awake at night. Since WordPress creates many URLs to reach the same contents I used to think that I get penalized.

Though there are some who say that it is only a penalty when you have contents duplicated outside the domain. What do you think ?