Darren at ProBlogger has a new Group Writing Project – TOP 5 is the theme this time. These projects are a great way to meet new people. Getting down to business, there is a great interest in the Google Supplemental Index and Supplemental results more in general.
Recently Google has modified their way to index and evaluate websites. First of all run the site:www.yourdomainname.com command browse the search engine results pages. If you see the supplemental results tag then read on … Top 5 issues you need to be aware of to keep your website out of the Supplemental Results:
- Not Enough Content If you are serious about your rankings and facing stiff competition the first thing you need to do is evaluate how much content is available for indexing. Although many are still achieving top rankings with tricks, it won’t be long before their competition will out rank them just because they have better content.
- Duplicate Content Trap If your website is an E-commerce with thousands of pages presenting your products, chances are many of your pages may go supplemental, because the amount of "good content" is watered down by your template menus and complementary information. You can run a quick check following my advice in this post on testing your website against Google Supplemental Results.
- Unique TITLES and META TAGS Put all your efforts into creating tailored to fit titles and descriptions for your pages – without them you are at great risk to go supplemental. It sounds pretty obvious but there are still countless websites out there all making the same mistake. Your title tag is very very important: If you cannot find the time to create title tags, don’t expect the search engines to go an extra length to figure out what your page is about …
- Hard to read URLs What do your URLs look like ?Are they easily read by a person ?Do they have session IDs in them ?Are they all looking very similar to each other ?How many pages are showing up in the site command ?You might be having problems with your content management system (CMS). Review your CMS back end to determine how you can implement a re-write strategy, possibly to make you URLs keyword rich.
- Content without incoming links If you are running a blog you know how important it is to offer new and interesting information. What’s just as important is to have people link and comment. The more your incoming links are sparse throughout your website, the better your deep linking ratio. If you create new content and there are no incoming links, it will go supplemental.
So much for the top 5 issues on Google supplemental results. Now 2 questions and answers based on my experience.
- Will I be able to rank on Google if most of my web pages are in the Google supplemental index ? No, not in my experience, although some say that they are alive and kicking although supplemental .. if you ask me it’s only to raise the buzz and generate links …
- I have a new website and my pages are in the Google Supplemental Index. I did everything by the book – What is happening? This has been happening over the past few months – I have witnessed a few cases myself. New pages in sub-folders are going directly into the supplemental index. It looks like Google is putting them there once recognized, then goes back and takes a closer look at them and see if they "past the test" and then proceed to the main index.This is happening with websites where spidering activities are slow (although the site is doing great in terms of rankings).
If you have any direct experience please share it with me and the other readers. If you’d like to ask some questions on search engines please do ! See also: A closer look at Google Supplemental Results
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Hey you pinched my topic!
Seriously, it’s a good post. That’s the good thing about this contest – lots of new blogs to check out.