I started on a serious search to find the best information on Google supplemental index (SI) related to Wordpress and found a lot of people (most) are just throwing out theories. They are creating plugins with, in my opinion, no real understanding of the issue and why Google puts Wordpress pages in the SI.
One guy has been flaming me about how crappy our Wordpress-based product is like it’s our fault. (Hey David, you can stop now. I get the point - you’re clueless. Let’s leave it at that.)
What I learned from my extensive reading on the subject from a gazillion bloggers, garage SEO bands, and the “top” SEO guys is no one knows what they are talking about. Everything is contradictory and everyone has an opinion based on theories, not fact.
So I went to the source. The “voice of Google” who has some of his own pages in supplemental results. Yeah…even Matt Cutts has supplemental results.
Here’s what he said in his latest post on the issue, Infrastructure Status, January 2007:
As a reminder, supplemental results aren’t something to be afraid of; I’ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer o’ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
That’s about as clear and sensible explanation of supplemental results as you are going to find anywhere on the web from an authoritative source. Surprise, surprise, it’s all about the links. Deep links. Most people go find links to their home page and think they are doing all they can do to improve their rankings.
The other important note is “on the basis of merit.” Meaning you have to have content people link to “editorially” of their own free will, which means you have to have good content. Good, original content.
After that, if you have pages in the SI, check what backlinks they have and see if any PageRank has transferred to them yet, and you’ll have a better understanding as to why they are in the SI.
Get them linked or let them sit depending on their value to you having traffic hit them and being ranked.
And then be done with it. Don’t waste a lot of time trying to get old pages out of SI when you have a lot of other marketing and writing to do. Going retroactive on your Google search engine marketing to a high degree really has diminishing returns when you consider that time is much better spent on new content and new traffic sources and links.
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April 06.13.07 at 11:46 am
I used to find that getting backlinks from about 5 article directories to the page you want out of SI used to work. It seems to no longer be the case.
I have internal pages which have a PR of 2 yet are in SI now. Perhaps they have dropped in PR but it hasn’t shown on the bar?
Here is an example page, it’s in SI but has PR of 2:
“http://www.finerliving.net/bathroom/wetroom.htm”
April
Bill Wardell 06.13.07 at 11:54 pm
Once again Jack’s right on!
I waited for a couple of days, because I knew he would give us the right answer, and just like he told us 2 years ago be sure to focus on creating great content, and then back it up with links, using Power Linking strategies.
One year later he said write and post to your blog with great content, and develop a good linking strategy.
WOW what a surprise, 3rd year that I have known Jack and guess what his advice is and has been ever since writing Power Linking, create the best possible content that you can, and then people will link to you and what better way to get Power Links!!!
And, that’s how you create and develop an Authority Site…
Thanks again Jack, for talking the talk, but more importantly walking the walk!
Your friend,
Bill
Elizabeth Adams 06.14.07 at 12:00 am
Re: Duplicate Content, Supplemental Index and Matt Cutts
Hello, Jack …
——————————————————–
Note: I am re-posting this comment here because I do
truly feel that there is a little bit more to this issue
than Matt Cutts seems to suggest. At least part of the
problem stems from the fact that “duplicate content” is
part and parcel of the nature of blogs, and that there
is actually something very simple we can do about that.
——————————————————–
Well, if it was me, I’d start here, with the idea that,
if I was a search engine, then I wouldn’t want, let’s say,
four instances of the same page in my database.
But, since I’m a search engine, I can’t figure out which
one of the four I should keep, so I solve the problem by
throwing them all out. Simple!
So, if you don’t want all four of your pages thrown out,
then you just tell the search engine which one you want
to keep. Simple!
Does this mean that the other 3 pages won’t still be
on your blog?
No, it doesn’t. They’re still “there”. Real, regular people
can still see them … and link to them … and you’ll still
get credit for those links.
They’re just not in the search engines because you had the
good sense to use …
meta name = “robots” content=”noindex, follow”
… in your page headers for the other three instances
so the search engines will know that that content isn’t
for them. Simple!
Of course, if it’s after the fact … if you’ve been building
a blog for years and have thousands of pages … then it’s a
job of work to go in there and edit the code to conform to
this concept.
But then again, if you’ve been blogging for years, you
probably have lots of “link love”, and it’s my understanding,
from reading a transcript of Google’s Matt Cutts, that lots of
backlinks covers a multitude of sins and saves you from
“Supplementals Hell”.
Still, if you’re just starting up, or have only been blogging
for just a few months, it seems to me like it wouldn’t hurt
to tell the search engines which links to index and which links
to leave alone.
That way, the search engines are happy because there’s only one
instance of any given page of yours in their results, and you’re
happy because all of your pages are *both* listed *and* available
to your visitors in several cross-referenced categories.
Warmest regards …
Elizabeth
P.S.
It’s my understanding that “quality of content” per se really
isn’t the issue because, apart from obvious keyword stuffing
or something black-hat like that, the spiders really can’t
judge content quality. So the only thing the search engines
have to fall back on in that regard is “link love”, on the
theory that people wouldn’t link to you if they didn’t love
you. This seems a rather fatuous assumption to me, but then
I’m not a search engine. You just never know what a robot
is going to find exciting!
Dubai news 06.14.07 at 5:37 am
Google is pushing for people to get more “quality editorial links”, they are also pushing the ability to get into the main index away form areas directly controlled by webmasters and into 3rd party issues.
What happened to the entire keyword silo thing of last year? Google shifting the official goalpost to try and avoid people gaming the search engine.
Joost 07.01.07 at 9:23 am
It appears no to be only about link love from other websites. Internal links count as well. A more comprehensive explanation is in a post we did about a month ago:
http://www.dgfmedia.net/blog/2007/05/29/results-of-getting-pages-out-of-googles-supplemental/
Jack Humphrey 07.01.07 at 9:41 am
Very good resource/post on internal linking and popularity contest plugin. Glad I comply with that at least!