SEM/SEO Tips

The drive for me to write this blog post was mainly from a PM from a member of SEO Philippines. His message below and i translated parts of his message in Tagalog to English.

This is Carl of carlocab.com

I have been a fan of you since the start Your the best in SEO! And, I’m not. hehehehehe…

If you have the time, may I please ask for some tips how you got most of your pages of your globalwarming awareness2007 blog in the supplemental index? Because my blog has 100+ pages in the supplemental index

And based on what I know, the less pages in the supplemental index results of a certain site, the higher the search engine ranking isn’t it?

If you have to chat, you can add me
********@hotmail.com
********@yahoo.com

Thanks
Carl

Before I do answer this, lets do some definitions first.

What is Google’s Supplemental Index?

A lot of bloggers blogged about this, some say it’s really bad while some say don’t even worry about it. But taking it from Google Engineer Matt Cutts, he says it’s something not to worry about. And as mentioned in one of the episodes of The Pulse by Barry Schwartz with Chris Boggs and Ben Pfeiffer, has mentioned that the Supplemental Index seems to be a good step for Google to take to clean up the search results where some extra checking may be needed.

Do I think the Supplemental Index is something good or something to worry about?

Personally I think it’s ok to have the supplemental index. Because in the eyes of the search engine user, the supplemental index attempts to put down the ranking of pages that still needs further review (not necessarily some person manually reviewing sites, maybe it’s just a longer algorithmic process. or maybe it will be stuck there forever unless the page changes.) and are placed in the supplemental index. Some say the pages in supplemental index do not appear in the search results, but based on my experience, the results are included in the search results but are placed last. And pages that are in the main index are given higher ranking.

What makes your sites go into the supplemental index?

Mainly duplicate content. This is mainly in the main content of the site although I have seen several company websites with many pages in the supplemental index and upon looking into them, some of these sites have the same Title tags and Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions, thus it is nice to have them all different. I believe there was a time that Search Engine Watch had this problem too. So the solution is simple, avoid duplicate content. And I personally like the supplemental index because it is a good indicator that I have duplicate content somewhere telling me I need to fix my site.

Blog problems with duplicate content

Carl was asking me about his problem with his site in supplemental index. I checked his site that had 320 pages indexed in the Google with about 115 of it in supplemental results. I did not look further into his site but i just assumed right away it is some common Wordpress blog issues with SEO on duplicate content. I happens all the time on many blogs. Duplicate content on blogs can happen with various ways how to view the same story but with different URLs.

• Homepage and pages from the homepage
• Archive view by date
• Category view
• Permalink of the story itself

That is already the possible chance of showing 4 views of the same content. Causing duplicate content and many pages may land in the supplemental index. Below is a good video presentation by Michael “Grayworf” Gray on this on how to get pages of Wordpress blogs have minimal duplicate content.

Now what I used to do in not making other pages viewed by search engines causing duplicate content is I even cloaked some of my navigational elements so search engines would not crawl it, but that might have some issues being in the gray area, and what I used on my SEO World Championship contest entry that won the contest, was several things, first the plugin by Badi Jones of SEOLogs, the Wordpress Duplicate Content Cure. This makes all other views like the archive and category views have the meta tag noindex so that pages does not get indexed. I also make it a point I do the right 301 redirects for domain canonicalization issues and I use my own 301 redirect modification using PHP. And that’s basically what I did with my other blogs. Not all my blogs since sometimes I am lazy fixing all of them. SEO for client sites are still a priority.

Posted in Google |

Posted on Sunday, June 10th, 2007 at 9:59 pm under Google. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.