Though I read through forums and blogs about all the scary things about google supplemental results, I hadn’t paid much attention to it until I set up this blog. Sometime in Sep 2006, I setup this blog and used to post sporadically and didnt bother much about optimizing or promoting. My premise was like, let me build some good content and go then out with some promotion, obtain links and optimize this blog.

The site got indexed in about a week, however the happiness was shortlived. Since I wasnt posting frequently, I started seeing that the same content was appearing in multiple pages with different URL’s like the post for the day(2006/10/07) and post for the category. There are mixed opinions about this information architecture issue. While some say this being the general architecture of blogs and since search engines recognize this and wouldnt consider this as duplicate content, unfortunately there is a good number of blogs get trapped in the supplemental results and this blog is one of them too.

Though I was little demotivated to see this blog go into supplemental, I shifted my focus to experimeting with this concept. All it takes is the cost of a domain name and hosting and some good amount of time. Interestingly enough MSN was showing just one inner page of the blog as indexed and nothing else.

So I went back to do some structural changes to this blog. Well here is a list of things that I did

1. Placed unique title for each post
2. Added Meta Description and Keywords information for each post/category
3. Changed to url structure from something like 2006/10/07 to something like google-supplemental-results
4. Redirected non-www to the www version
5. Did a 301 redirect from the old pages to the new pages
6. Placed a sitemap page with a list of all posts and categories

I waited for a while for the search engines to pick up the new pages. And slowly the new pages were indexed and showing up on Yahoo and MSN, however on Google all pages except for the home page were in supplemental results.

Here is quick summary of the above experiment, with the steps that I have taken conclusions arrived at and the questions that remain unanswered

1. Made sure the pages were unique
2. Made sure the same content dosent show up under different URL after the change in URL structure
3. Waited until the search engines picked up the new URL’s and changes
4. Interestingly enough I was still in supplemental results which leaves me with one other critical variable to test which is building links to the site.

Well link building, thats another big story that I will save for tomorrow. Stay Tuned!!!

Quick Tip: Calculating your supplemental index ratio - the number of pages of your site in supplemental index Vs the number of pages of your site in the main index.

(site:www.searchtipster.com *** -view)/(site:www.searchtipster.com)= 56/57=98.2% of my blog is in the supplemental results. What a loser? Well you learn a lot from failure than success.

Feel free to post a comment on your experience with google supplemental results.

Tags:google supplemental results search engine algorithms