Whole Site gone Supplemental

MrMean · 12-04-2006, 01:28 AM

Hi, for some odd reason my whole blog and everything around it besides the homepage has gone to supplemental which is a tad heart breaking. I just cannot figure out why?

I've been scanning around and there aren't really many strong suggestions on how I can get out of this whole I've crawled into, I'm open to suggestions

googlesuccess · 12-04-2006, 02:08 AM

That's not a good news. I have a few suggestions.

1. Improve your internal linking. Start with a link to the home from every page. Another way is to have plugins for recent posts and/or related posts.

2. Have different meta description and keywords for each post. You can achive this easily by using Headspace2 plugin from urbangiraffe.com

3. Refrain from mentioning about poker, casino etc. in your blog. Who knows some bad neighbourhood will pick up such posts in Technorati and start linking to your site.

4. Get some relevant incoming links to your internal posts too.

5. Have patience. Good luck

MrMean · 12-04-2006, 07:18 AM

Are the chances of me getting out pretty slim?

googlesuccess · 12-04-2006, 08:05 AM

When your site gets into supplemental index, it is crawled less frequently. I just checked your incoming links. You have only 2 PR4 links, one coming from directory.v7n.com and another from hosting.v7n.com. It is better you get some more high PR incoming links relevant to your website. That will make Google trust your site and spider it often.

Aviva · 12-04-2006, 08:21 AM

--> if it's duplicate content, rewrite it
--> get more links to your site
--> while I don't normally recommend it, in this case I think it makes sense to submit a google sitemap
--> move the content over to new urls

andheresjohnny · 12-05-2006, 10:43 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MrMean

Hi, for some odd reason my whole blog and everything around it besides the homepage has gone to supplemental which is a tad heart breaking. I just cannot figure out why?

I've been scanning around and there aren't really many strong suggestions on how I can get out of this whole I've crawled into, I'm open to suggestions

You said this is a blog. As such are you pretty much writing all original content, or are you just posting PLR articles?

I'm curious because I didn't think that entire original-post blogs got caught-up in supplemental.

vangogh · 12-05-2006, 05:08 PM

The answer might be easier than you think. The same thing happened to my blog a few months ago. Google was indexing my feeds and causing everything to look like a duplicate of itself. When I go deep into the results for a site: search for your blog I'm seeing the same thing.

I wrote a post Problems With WordPress Posts Going Supplemental In Google’s Index about what I found and what I ultimately did.

Basically I had to disallow in my robots.txt file the various ways Googlebot was indexing the feed to my blog.

In less than a week my pages starting coming out of the supplemental index and I started getting a lot more traffic because it of.

I have a feeling you're having the same problem I did and if so the fix is really easy and you should start seeing some good results in a matter of days depending on how often your blog is spidered.

Hope it helps.

solidghost · 12-05-2006, 06:49 PM

vg, i think your article also deals with other sites that has rss feeds.
But surprisingly not all sites with rss feed (and being indexed by Google) has the same problem.

I have seen forums with such feeds, but they don't go into supplemental results. But some do. I really don't understand. Or perhaps it could be how the script dishes out the rss feed?

ninjashoes · 12-05-2006, 07:32 PM

I would definetly make the meta descriptions unique for each page if you havent already. Any other ways you can make the individual pages unique will help imo. i think vangogh probably has the best answer for you though.

SaltLampKing · 12-05-2006, 11:16 PM

I don't understand, what is supplemental ?

googlesuccess · 12-05-2006, 11:53 PM

Vangogh, thanks for your advice. I have a query in regard to the duplicate content for blogs. If a blog has categories and archives, any post can be accessed by multiple URLs such as

blog/post
blog/category-one/post
blog/category-four/post
blog/jan-2207/post

So Google may treat some of these URLs as supplemental as they have the same duplicate content. How should we tackle this issue?

vangogh · 12-06-2006, 04:40 PM

SaltLampKing, Google has its regular index and also it's supplemental index. I believe the way the supplemental index works is if Google doesn't find good results in the main index for a query it then goes to the supplemental index. It's obviously better to be in the main index since that's the index that is looked at first.

googlesuccess, the first WebmasterWorld thread I linked to in my post talks about the duplicate content issue you mention. I think it depends a little on how your blog is set up, but the basic solution is to add <meta name="robots" content="noindex,follow"> to the pages you don't want indexed. You can set it up in one of the WordPress files so that you don't have to add it to every page that gets created. WordPress will do it for you and the thread at WMW has a few possible ways to set it up.

A little more background on my issue. My blog started in January of this year and each post was picking up some traffic through a couple of long tail searches around a single keyword phrase. As I added more content I was getting a little more traffic. And each month was seeing about a 25% increase in traffic from Google over the previous month.

Then in mid June it all just seemed to stop. I tried a couple of quick fixes At first I figured it was just some temporary thing, then I tried a couple of quick fixes, but nothing was working. If it had just been a few posts here or there I wouldn't have been concerned, since that could be anything, but it was all traffic to the blog.

I'd also noticed that all the pages in the blog had gone supplemental.

I searched without luck for awhile until I came across the WebmasterWorld threads. I had removed the archives from the blog and thought the categories and the single posts were different enough that they wouldn't be duplicates of each other. I have the categories only showing the first paragraph of each post.

When I did a site: search on my site again and looked at the supplemental pages I saw they were all showing with:

/feed/
/trackback/
/rss/

or some combination at the end of every URL, which is why I went with the solution I used. I think I modified my robots.txt file on a Thursday night and by the end of the weekend could already notice the traffic coming back. It maybe took a week or two before all the pages were out of the supplemental index and back in the main index.

I think this is just a WordPress issue, though I can't say for certain. Since my blog is WordPress I really didn't look further. And I'm not sure why it would only affect WordPress, but I have a feeling it's only WP that sees this issue.

ninjashoes, I think shortly before this happened or maybe as one of the original things I tried I had downloaded a couple of WP plugins that uses the first 'x' characters of each post as the meta description. The titles of the posts have always been unique. I think having both unique helps, but this seemed to go beyond having them unique.

It was incredibly frustrating when it first happened, especially since I had no idea why and couldn't find a solution. It was amazing how fast the problem was solved though, after adding a few lines to my robots.txt.

MrMean · 12-07-2006, 02:16 AM

Thanks for all your replies just to answer a few of your questions:
-- There isn't any duplicated content as far as I'm aware. However this is a blog covering all sorts of things, day to day life, cars, seo, and other things.

I am going to try your suggestion with the /feeds/, /trackbacks/ etc and I will be doing some more link building soon enough, the site isn't actually quite finished yet. So its a bit disappointing if its going supplemental before its even really been heavily promoted. Which was scheduled for January/Febuary next year.

We shall see what happens

imgtube · 12-07-2006, 02:59 AM

You should always keep your old files so if something stuffes up you can go back.

draligus · 12-07-2006, 04:59 AM

getting more links is the best

googlesuccess · 12-07-2006, 07:28 AM

vangogh, Thanks for your detailed reply. Now I know how to avoid my wordpress blog going into supplemental.

MrMean · 12-29-2006, 02:34 AM

Just as a follow up on this thread, with the steps advised above I have managed to pull out of supplemental results. Thanks for all your help.

vangogh · 01-03-2007, 03:13 PM

Glad it worked. When I looked at what Google was showing for your site in the index it looked very close to what I had been seeing with my site. I had a feeling what I suggested above would work and really glad it did. I know the feeling when all your pages seem to be supplemental and you can't figure out why.

Did the change happen quickly? In my case I noticed the posts starting to come back to the main index in a few days and it maybe took a couple of weeks before all were out of the supplemental index.