jonlee.ca

Google’s Supplemental Index is a topic of constant debate amongst SEO (search engine optimization) fanatics. A month ago, I had over 500 pages in the supplemental index. Since performing a couple of little fixes, I am proud to say I’m now down to 5 pages in the index!

If you’ve never heard of Google’s Supplemental Index, here’s a short little intro. If you have, I’d like to hear your views on it.

What is Google’s Supplemental Index?
A lot of people view Google’s supplemental as the place your pages goes to when Google believes it is duplicate content, untrusted or just plain useless.

Why is the Supplemental Index Important?
Whether or not your page is in the supplemental index can mean the difference being on the first page of Google or the 30th page for a particular search term.

How do I check how many of my pages are in the Supplemental Index?
You can preform a simple Google search as follows, replacing my domain with yours of course:

site:jonlee.ca *** -view

Or as I prefer, you can use the Firefox SEO Extension which is what I use since it gives a lot of extra information as well.

How do I get out of the Supplemental Index?
Basically, you want to remove duplicate content from your site. For example, on blogs, possible sources of duplicate content include search, tag, category and archive pages where your full articles may appear. One way to fix this is to not display entire posts on these pages, but rather snippets or just a title. However, an easier way would be to use a robots.txt file that will block Googlebot (and other crawlers) from indexing these pages in the first place. You’re welcome to start with mine and build on it. robotstxt.org is a great site to help you get started. Here’s a good article with more details on escaping the supplemental index.

Is it actually bad to be in the Supplemental Index?
There is no argument as to whether or not the supplemental index exists but whether it is bad to be in it is under constant debate. Most people would say yes but some say it has no effect whatsoever. Either way, there’s no harm in getting yourself out of it! Here are some articles regarding this discussion:

• The Skinny on the Supplemental Index
• Google’s Supplemental Index: Questions and Inconsistencies
• Confusion Over Google’s Supplemental Index

I’d like to know what everybody’s thoughts are on this.

By the way, I’d recommend you check out Danielle’s post on PPC and SEO as well as the discussion in the comments — it’s a very good read!

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 29th, 2007 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Site stuff, Web Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.