Lately there has been a great deal of interest in Google’s supplemental index. In the past it was pretty obvious why a page would get tossed in there, but lately many webmasters have had issues with a page getting sent to supplemental hell for no apparent reason. Here are some of the more common reasons:
Bad URL
Search bots are not very smart, they have a hard time reading certain URLs that aren’t search engine friendly. If you are still in the dark ages and are using GET variables in your URLS (?sess=1234, for example) it is time to come into the 21st century and use a nice little thing called URL rewriting.
URLs that are not keyword rich can also make it into the supplemental index as well. Instead of naming something “seodoc” name it “helpful_seo_tips”, etc.
Duplicate Content
Duplicate content can be split up into two parts, internal and external:
Internal: Internal duplicate content basically means you have multiple copies of the same content on your site. This alone will probably not kick a page into the sup. index, but it can be a factor. The best way to avoid this issue is to use robots.txt to disallow indexing of unimportant pages that are nothing more than copies of other pages.
External: I would highly recommend writing your own content, and I would highly recommend not letting others use your content (unless, of course, your getting something good in return). Multiple copies of the same page throughout the ‘net is a sure-fire way of getting 99% of the copies into the supplemental index. If you do let someone use your content, request a link to the original article, that way the bots can figure out which one is the original.
Poor Content
Obviously if your page contains bad content it wont’ rank at all. Personally, I try to make each page have at least 100 words, but that may not happen depending on the topic of the page. It also doesn’t hurt to make the content really keyword rich (much more important than how many words a page contains).
Quality content will always win.
Orphaned Pages
Remove all links to a page and it will be sent straight to the supplemental index. Period.
Inactive Page
If a page is older and has no new links coming it, it will slowly rank lower and lower, and eventually it will hit the bottom. If you notice that happening go through and change around some words and try to get some more links pointing to it.
Unique Meta Data
If your page has the same title and meta data as your other pages it will be much harder to get them to rank well. Just like with the main content of your page (and the URL), you should try to make the meta data as unique as possible.
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