Supplemental Results? Need advice

[Simon Gooffin]

Hi all,
I often see Supplemental Result over there in Google search. I read quite many information on this and I could not completely understand what it is. Some people say it's Google Hell, others say webmasters should not be scared of this a lot and there is a good chance to bring the pages back to normal.
After reading this article I started to worry as I have quite many pages in Supplemental Results for my another site:
http://www.jimboykin.com/damned-to-google-hell-supplemental-results/

Can anybody explain what it is or may be some information from own experience?

[dotcomdesigns]

This is a newlsetter I received from an SEO company I subscribe to:

If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then it is likely that your web pages could not be parsed correctly by Google's standard crawler.

The problem with Google's supplemental results are that they are only supplemental. If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won't be returned very often for regular search queries.

How to find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results

An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google's supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com:

site:www.domain.com ***

Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results. Of course, you have to replace www.domain.com with your own domain name.

How to get out of Google's supplemental results

Most web sites have pages in Google's supplemental results. It means that Google had difficulty to index these pages or that Google had other problems with these pages.

1. Make sure that your web pages don't contain any spam elements and that you don't use any spam techniques to promote your web site. Using spam techniques to promote your web site is often the reason why a web site doesn't get good rankings. Better focus on ethical search engine optimization methods.

2. Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages. If possible don't use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol. Make sure that the HTML code of your web pages offers what search engines need.

3. Make these pages easy to find for Google's web crawler. The more links point to your web pages, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers fill find your web pages.

Most web sites have pages in Google's supplemental results. The easier you make it Google to index your web pages the more pages of your site will be listed in Google's normal results.

[OWG]

Simon you have a pm ;)

Suffice to say that while poor url structure, or slow responding servers CAN get you into the SI, it is NOT the main reason for it. The main reasons are something different entirely. :)

[SkGold]

Simon you have a pm ;)

Suffice to say that while poor url structure, or slow responding servers CAN get you into the SI, it is NOT the main reason for it. The main reasons are something different entirely. :)
Why just Simon? (Well, it is not my business, I guess :) )

From my experience and understanding the main reason for SI is similar, or if you want you may call it duplicate content.

That is why most directory pages that have no listings (or just a couple listings), similar title, similar meta description will be 100% in supplemental index. Also many blogs have supplemental index problems, because they have similar content in several places.

How to avoid and recover from supplemental index:
1. Make sure to have different title for all your pages.
2. Make sure to have different meta description for all your pages.
3. Pages content should be different from page to page at least by 25%. Nobody knows exactly how much but from my experience you need at least 25%.
4. External linking is the best way to avoid supplemental index. If you have many external links to some page on your site, than this page will never go to SI (has to be different content of course).
5. Internal linking structure is very important. Make sure to link your pages between each other.
6. Deep pages most likely will be in supplemental index, so keep you pages as close to the top as possible.
7. Poor site design and slow server (has been already mention by others).
8. If you have for example 3 pages with the same content it is better to index only one. You may force SE not to index the other 2 pages by using meta ‘noindex’ or robots.txt file.

Those are most important factors from my knowledge and experience.

OWG, you are welcome to add something.;)

[subseo]

Concur to what Sergey wrote, good post.

Best way for a directory to get to supplemental index:
- use the pre-made category dump that everybody else is using
- don't bother about getting any links
- list junk content
- get the listings from where everybody else is getting them - directory submission lists. Submitters just use the same title and description all over and in the end they are spoiling it for themselves (their link will have no value) and for directory owners (directory in supplemental index = "no directory")

[OWG]

Why just Simon? (Well, it is not my business, I guess :) )



EXACTLY!



OWG, you are welcome to add something

Thanks for your permission :D

On a serious note I would agree with everything you said in your post :) Although it would be better to refer to links pointing into a site by the correct terminology that the industry uses, being inbound links. External links (in industry speak) are links from your site that point OUT to other sites. Other than that nitpick, you covered it all

Low PR and duplicate content are the 2 main elements that will get you thrown into Supplemenetal hell. All the things you mention will help prevent this, providing the pages linking to you have edequate PR.

Directories are more prone to getting into the SI, as are blogs, simply because of the way they are. I edit on some large directories, and have a couple of my own as well and what I would say is NEVER launch a category unless you have at least 3 or more sites to go into it, or a chunk of text to use on the page. This of course comes into duplicate content issues.

The other mistake you can make is getting all your backlinks to your home page. Natural linking rarely happens like that. 90% of links online are to internal pages with specific content. My rugby forum for example picks up loads of links, but they are almost all to deep pages, specific threads etc.

Mimic the natural way of linking with a site. It is not easy but it helps. One decent deep link is worth a shedload of backlinks to your home page.