Since my last posts about how you clean up your Wordpress blog to avoid duplicate content and a vigorous discussion on supplemental results and Wordpress blogs, I decided to check again today to see the results of my changes.
What I Changed
See supplemental index fix post about what I changed and how I made sure there was only one occurrence of any piece of content on the site.
I did this about a month ago. I still have many pages in supplemental results, but if you look closely, they are all junk pages like tag pages and comments results. Stuff I, nor you, would care about.
How To Check Your Supplemental Results (ONLY supplemental pages and not mixed with your good listings!)
Type this into your Google search bar, changing to your domain name of course:
site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf
You are welcome, of course, to do this with my site and see why I no longer care about the fact I have that many pages in supplemental results. They are all old pages and stupid things like comments and other things I don’t even know why Google would waste storage space on.
They are pages that don’t make me any money, that I don’t want people landing on instead of my high value pages, and are generally junk stuff.
The pages I wished to get out of supplemental hell are now out - in about a month.
Sweet! All is good again in FTR world. Now go fix your blog - the proof has arrived!
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Ken Johnstone 07.12.07 at 5:56 am
Hi Jack,
Many thanks for sharing your results! I’m glad to hear they worked for you.
However, my own results and research in this area lead me to emphasize a couple of further points:
• eliminating urls on your site with the same content is part of the solution, but it is not a general solution for everyone
⁃ For example, on my site (homemusicrecording.com), I implemented the “the_excerpt” code as recommended by Lorelle on May 5th 2007. Up until last week, all but 4 of my urls remained in Google’s Supplemental index.
• Some WordPress Themes already incorporate this functionality when the “more” option is used in a post; this is true or partially true in 9 of the 11 Widgetized themes provided with WordPress Master.
So I suggest anyone aiming to combat Google Supplementitis with this tactic asks the following questions before embarking on what may be a fruitless task:
1. Does my Theme already support display of summaries for all post listings, except the permalink?
⁃ If it does, use “more” or an Explicit Optional Excerpt with every post
2. If not, is it worth the effort to customize the code?
⁃ Yes! - for anyone, like Jack, with many existing posts on their site
⁃ No! - for everyone else; just use “more” or an Explicit Optional Excerpt with every post
I’m unable, without a valid test procedure covering a sufficient number of sites, to draw conclusions which can be reliably applied to other blog websites in general. The IM world is subject to far too many variables…
However, we can certainly learn from each other, and where sufficient information is provided, adopt the emerging “best practices” with reasonable confidence.
Cheers,
Ken