Yahoo Search is great and Bing is quickly gaining ground as a worthy search engine. When Yahoo and Microsoft combine their specialties, they could become the collective kings of the search world. This partnership could bring forth great things for both companies but as it stands now, Google is dominant and its search engine is the one all webmasters optimize for. While Google can definitely help deliver the traffic you desire, you need to make it a priority to ensure your site doesn’t end up in its dreaded supplemental index.
What is the Supplemental Index?
Writer Andy Greenberg’s 2007 Forbes article entitled “Condemned To Google Hell,” best describes the supplemental index. The article explains how two online businesses lost traffic and eventually sales because their pages fell into the deep, dark abyss where URLs are buried. A major focal point of the story was to determine what could cause something like this to happen, speculating that purchasing links and duplicate content were among the culprits. This was clarified by Matt Cutts, Google spokesperson, who let it be known that the supplemental index does not mean a particular website has been penalized. According to Cutts, the determining factor to whether a web page makes it in the main or supplemental index is its page rank. Despite this clarification, the supplemental index is the not place where you want your web pages to end up, especially if your trying to promote your business through SEO.
Keeping Your Site Above Ground
To keep your web pages from falling into the depths of the Google supplemental index, we recommend following these four tips:
1.) Unique Page Titles – This is a basic step that often gets overlooked. Put a little extra effort into your page titles as it helps in terms optimization, usability and more clickthroughs in the search results.
2.) Unique Content – There are many reasons why your pages may not be as unique as you think. This could be due to a shopping cart or CMS flaw, but the more identical content you have at multiple URLs, the better chances you have of being tucked away in the Google supplemental index. Go through your pages and make sure you have at least 100 words of unique content.
3.) More Quality Links – Trust has become a key aspect of quality link building. By gathering links from a few trusted sites that are already ranked, you will show Google that your site can be trusted and is worthy of the main index. If at all possible, try to get some links from high ranking sites. Though some argue that this won’t do much in terms of ranking, it could be a winning factor in the way of indexing.
4.) Internal Page Links - Many sites have dozens of inbound links, but all of them are pointing back to their homepage. In several cases, the homepage of the site makes it into the main index while all the internal pages are abandoned and swept into the supplemental file cabinet. To avoid this issue, you may want to pick out your most relevant internal pages and get about four to five links coming back to them. Even if you have previously left them unattended, don’t worry because the Google bot will typically revisit your site and crawl those internal pages again. This time, they will make their way into the main index instead of being left behind in Google hell.
December 5th, 2009 at 9:05 pm
Not currently, but with a bit of work this is possible as well.