Recovering From Supplemental Index
January 8, 2007 – 5:56 amIf you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
The Supplemental Index promises to the the major talking point for early 2007 as more and more websites have found their way into its’ clutches. The Supplemental Index, in essence, contains pages that aren’t good enough to be included in the main Google index. Once a page is relagated to this particular dustbin, the chances are great that the page won’t rank highly in the SERPs anymore.
Luckily, more and more information is coming out concerning Supplementals. Adam Lasnik of Google has written some documents on the subject that must be considered the “Magna Carta” of what supplementals are, and how you get rid of them. I’ll refer you the Google Groups thread, The Skinny on Supplementals.
The “cure” for Supplemental results is said to be:
Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index.
Lasnik is also clear to indicate that being in the Supplemental Index is not a penalty of any sort. It might feel like it to you, but it’s no indication that your website has been caught misbehaving.
In reality, the solution may be as simple as this, or may require greater webmastering. In fact, looking for the possible causes of “duplicate content” and “supplementals” should keep you busy for quite some time.
The basic attempted cure for Supplemental results is:
1) Link to the page or pages - Supplementals tend to occur when a page is orphaned or several levels down from the root
2) Make sure that pages you have, especially ones that are made from templates, have enough unique content on their pages.
3) Ensure that each page has a unique title and description tag.
Fixing the problem may take an entire re-design of your site structure. This may or may not be worth it, depending on how much money you derive from Google. In any event, Google is much touchier than it ever was before about including pages, so you’ll need to consider how many pages you have that can actually rank, and develop a strategy from there.
Are you having any trouble with Supplementals?
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3 Responses to “Recovering From Supplemental Index”
I have an online tutorial on Google’s supplemental here. It looks better if you download it and play it full screen.
http://www.mr-seo.com/Supplemental-Index-Tutorial.html
By Mr SEO on Jan 8, 2007
Regarding 1) - we have many pages in the supplemental index that are just two clicks away from the home page. I hope Google doesn’t expect all sites to have a navigation that will allow for all pages being reachable with one click! That would mean a really small site or if it’s a large site, the ugliest navigation bar on earth.
By Robert on Jan 8, 2007
You aren’t kidding Robert.
This whole system of valuing pages appears pretty stupid to me. We’ll have to see if the implementation is better in the future, but right now way too many pages are in the Supplemental index.
By Darren McLaughlin on Jan 8, 2007