How to get out of Google’s Supplemental Hell.

Well as promised, here is the second part to my Google’s Supplemental Hell post explaining the
best methods of avoiding and getting out of Google’s supplemental index.

Dynamic Sites.
One of the main problems I have experienced with many of my e-commerce clients is the use of dynamically generated pages based around a single URL such as products.asp or details.php. The issue is that the page template isn’t dynamic enough and contains a static title, meta data and textual content.

Often the fact that a pages is too similar to another causes it to be in the supplemental index. Therefore by added extra
dynamic elements to the offending page template, the pages can be made more bespoke and eventually promoted to the man Google index.

Duplicate Pages.

Also on a similar note, check every page isn’t duplicated and is only accessed via a single URL. Microsoft IIS is a pain for
this as it isn’t case sensitive. Therefore blah.html and Blah.html will both show the same page. Another common one is id=4&page=2 then page=2&id=4.

No Link Juice.

A lack of what we call link juice is another issue that can be a problem. A site with many pages but very few descent links (a whole new blog post) will often see only its homepage in the main index and all others in the supplemental.

The way around this is to source some authoritative links to your site. Good places to start are the large directories thought to be used as Trust Rank seeds, such as Dmoz and the Yahoo Directory. From there find the authorities in your particular area and attempt to gain a link from them. My honest advice here is use the phone. Emails rarely work.

Poor Link Structure.

Some sites are structured in such a way that their content is only accessible after clicking 4 or 5 links from the homepage. Unless the site has a Page Rank of 5 or more, these pages are destined for the supplemental index.

To combat this problem, link to your most important content from your footer or from inside content on a higher level page.
As a rule every step from your homepage seems to drop the pages Page Rank by 1 or 2. Try and use a flatter linking structure to access all your pages.

Sitemaps.

Some say that Google sitemaps help with Supplemental issues. I personally prefer a basic sitemap linking to every page
and from every page. The jury is still out on this one.

To Conclude.

Make your pages distinct, get some good solid links, tweak your site structure and watch out for accidental duplication. Also
remember that sometimes pages in the supplemental index are meant to be there e.g. they don’t exist any more and will eventually fade into oblivion.