It’s 10pm… do you know where your pages are?
There’s been a lot of chatter lately in the SEO world about supplemental results. Just what are supplemental results?Go to Google and type in the command
site:www.yourdomain.com
Start clicking through the results and eventually you’ll probably see this:
An easier method, as I learned at SEO Roundtable was to do this command:
site:www.yourdomain.com/&
and you’ll see ONLY the supplemental results.
So what does it mean that some of my pages are in supplemental? In a nutshell, it means that for some reason, Google does not want these pages in their main index, as they feel it’s a page that could potentially supplement the results they WANT to show end users.
Google’s definition:
Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.
The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.
What are some of the reasons why Google deems it supplemental?
1. Duplicate Content - If you decide to take an easy route and “borrow” someone’s content, you’ll eventually get sent to Supplemental Results.
- Map your keywords. This takes a LOT of time. But if you are optimizing for a group of phrases (which you should be if you followed the 5 steps listed in my small business SEO tips post) map the destination page you’d like for that phrase.
- Check which pages on your site are linking to that page.
- Understand which pages are still in Google’s main index.
- Add a link to destination page from the above mentioned pages. Note: make sure the link makes sense! Don’t force a link for the sake of having a link. Usability is still REALLY important in this process.
- Last step: build external linking (or incoming links) to this supplemental page.
Be patient! It may take some time for Google or the other search engines to realize this page does provide value. The best thing you can do is make sure it IS a valuable page. Remember, everyone wants to be #1 in Google - it takes work to get there.
July 31st, 2007 at 8:30 pm
Good info on this, thanks.