3 Reasons You May Be in Google’s Supplemental Index
Google has two indexes that you can be in - the regular index and the supplemental index. Most search queries return results only from the regular index unless the term is so specific that there are few (or no) results from the regular index - then you will see some search results that say “Supplemental Result” in green after the URL and page size.I have noticed recently that many internet retailers have a large amount of pages in the supplemental index. I recently talked to a guy who has 3K pages indexed by google but after poking around a bit I realized that only 65 of those were in the regular index - a serious damper on his success on the tail terms that us retailers love so much.I have heard a lot of speculation about what lands you in the supplemental index but in my own experience I have only had 3 causes for getting sites in the supplemental index. Here are the major causes and my suggestions for overcoming them.Reason 1: Your brand newOK, I call people “brand new” a lot when I think they’re being dumb but here I am referring to your site literally being new. When I first create a site typically my homepage is indexed pretty quickly (within a few days) and a few days after that I see it in the regular index. Within a week or so all of the subpages are indexed, but they usually show up as supplemental results for another 2-4 weeks depending on how many backlinks I have.Solution: Just be patient and try to build high-quality, relevant links. The first few times I noticed I had sites in the supplemental index I freaked out and figured that I had a huge problem with my internal site structure. Now I just know that going through the supplemental index is a rite of passage.Reason 2: Duplicate contentUsually when I create a new site I use fresh, unique content. I have one site, however, which is an article directory. People upload articles to my site and I republish them. I am just playing with the concept because I like the idea of getting a ton of free content but, as you can see, it doesn’t do me much good. The people who upload the content to my site submit their articles to tons of other article directories so it all looks like duplicate content to the engines.To demonstrate what I am talking about do a google search for site:bizpong.com. Pretty cool to see 7K pages indexed (yes, I know that is a blatant lie) until you realize that exactly 1 of them is not in the supplemental index - mmmmm, gulp! (you got to hear Vuitton do it)Solution: Well, this one is pretty easy - write unique copy. If you don’t want to do that, however, you can always build more inbound links and work on your internal site structure. I haven’t played with it much but I think by employing those two techniques I could get some of the articles in my directory out of the supplemental. Economically it doesn’t really make sense, though - building good links is much harder than writing unique copy and I enjoy writing more. For you link ninjas out there, though, that may be an option.Reason 3: Making classic beginner mistakesOK, this is the part of my blog where I admit that sometimes I’m retarded. I’ve been doing SEO for quite a while now and I still make classic mistakes sometime (you know, like eating before a basketball game). Seriously, though, I just noticed that one of my sites is getting almost no traffic. I did a site:<mysite.com> and saw that two pages were indexed and the rest were in the supplemental index.After looking more carefully at the pages I realized that I had the same header on each page (I was using a php include) which wouldn’t be a problem except that I didn’t even bother putting in a meta tag description so the listing in google for each page looked exactly the same. By just adding in a meta tag description I am confident that within a week all of the pages will be well-index and (hopefully) ranking well in the SERP’s.Solution: This is a pretty easy one - if you are using a site template (you would be crazy not to with very few exceptions), make sure you have a meta tag for the description and that it is different for each page. I have seen new webmasters hard code the meta tag into the include file (usually the header) and relegate their entire site (except the home page) to the supplemental index - again, classic beginner’s mistake.Also make sure that you have a unique title tag for each page. I haven’t actually made this mistake but I have seen others do it - the title tag is one of the few truly important on-page features for SEO and you can really leverage it to rank on strategic keywords.If you are dealing with a supplemental index issue feel free to send me an email (preston at vizaddotcom) and I will be happy to take a look at your site. If your site has only been around for a couple of weeks I would advise you to just wait and see what happens, but you shouldn’t be dealing with supplemental issues for much longer than that on a new site.
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thems some good cookies boy.
Comment by Sam — January 15, 2007 @ 11:10 am
I am brand new. It’s like sitting at the kids table on holidays.
Comment by Jon — January 16, 2007 @ 7:45 pm
Very interesting article.
Comment by TYPO3 Agentur — May 6, 2007 @ 6:19 am