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Condemned to Google Hell: Getting out of the Supplemental

By: Justin Palmer, Wed Sep 12th, 2007

"Supplemental Result" - the term no company wants to see next to their website on the search page. Unfortunately though, millions of websites reside in Google's purgatory, destined to receive only minimal traffic. Why does the supplemental index exist? How can a website get out of it? The following will suggest the top 4 ways to get out of Google's supplemental results.

Remove Duplicate Content
90% of the time, a website is in the supplemental index because it contains content (usually text), that exists on many other websites. A few examples of this would be manufacturer product descriptions or syndicated content such as news or articles. How do you fix this? Simple, re-write content and make it original to your website.

Cleanup Complicated URL Parameters
Many websites, especially sites that rely on databases, use query strings in the URLs. For example, the parameter after the url might look like: ID=123&SOURCE=1234. Unfortunately, many search engine spiders don't like crawling these pages. One reason is that engines consider each url as a unique page, even if it has the same content. So although the pages with or without the parameter may have the exact same content, you may incur a duplicate content penalty.

What's the solution for this? Try to minimize using parameters if possible. While using them for external campaign tracking may be alright, definitely avoid them in the internal linking structure.

Many websites now are re-writing their ugly URL's with re-writing software. This also has search engine optimization benefits as well. Software such as this is available for both Windows and Apache servers.

Practice Deep Linking
While links to the homepage are great, targeted links to detail pages within your site will ensure that pages don't get orphaned and ignored by the spiders. If the crawler always starts at your home page, it's likely it will abandon the effort before crawling your whole site. Deep linking to content gives spiders a new starting point to find fresh and relevant pages.

Only the Beginning
The ideas listed above are only a few of the many tactics necessary to ensure your site stays out of Google's purgatory. However, implemented properly, they will begin to show the search engines that your content is fresh, relevant, and trustworthy. Because after all, supplemental free is the way to be.

Justin Palmer is the president of Palmer Web Marketing, a web site marketing company offering cheap

seo pricing. His current in C28.com, an online retailer of Christian tee-shirts, Christian beanies, and Christian music samples.

About the Author

Justin Palmer is the founder of PWM Web Marketing.