Aida Jolie

Google Supplemental Index Problems

Nathan Metzger of Not So Boring Life has a very interesting article that I found through Chow’s site about getting your blog out of the google supplement index. According to Nathan back in April Chris Garett did a great article on supplemental index problems that he was having on his Wordpress blog. 

Supposedly the Google supplement Index is where the undeserving pages go in the end.  The first step in taking care of this problem is downloading the Firefox browser if you do not have it and then downloading the SEO for Firefox plugin.

What is the Supplemental Index?
Lots of SEO masters believe that content that isn’t worthy ends up in the supplemental index. While this is certainly true, if you’re running a wordpress blog it is more likely that you’re simply dealing with duplicate content issues. If you make a post today on a default wordpress setup, there are about 5 different URLs you could type in that would give you the exact same content.

After downloading the plugin just go to your site and then right click your site and select SEO for Firefox then Lookup this page.  Now you should see a data window just like the screen shot above.  According to the stats I have 2,960 pages in the supplemental index and according to Nathan this means I have a lot of duplicate content.

How can you reduce the number of supplemental pages? By using the robots.txt file you tell Google what it can and cannot index on your site.  To get a better understanding of how to format the text file I used Nathan’s and Chow’s files as a starting base for mine. After you have completed the file just upload it into your root directory it’s that simple.

If you do not want to upload and configure the robots.txt file, Chris Garett offers an altertive method. Just add this code in your header template just above the title tag.

<?php
if((is_single() || is_category() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){
echo “<!– ok google, index me! –>”;
}else{
echo “<!– google, please ignore - thanks! –>”;
echo “<meta name=”\”robots\”” content=”\”noindex,follow\””>\n”;
}
?>

For now I have gone with the robots.txt because this is the recommendation by all SEO experts but maybe later down the road I may try the php script just to see what happens. Nathan has seen a 20% increase in traffic so I am hoping for the same. I will give update soon!

May 25, 2007 | posted in The Net, Wordpress 

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6 Responses to “Google Supplemental Index Problems”

  1. More Web Site Traffic on May 25th, 2007

    I am going to be doing something for my site as well, we have over 1,000

  2. Why Does My Page’s Location Change In Google Searches » Make Money Online with Ja Kel Daily Dot Com » Blog Archive on May 29th, 2007

    [...] a robots.txt [...]

  3. My Site Changed Locations in Google » Make Money Online with Ja Kel Daily Dot Com » Blog Archive on May 29th, 2007

    [...] a robots.txt [...]

  4. Jason Neuman on May 29th, 2007

    I change my robots.txt back it seemed like the file was blocking everything from google.

  5. Natron on June 26th, 2007

    I still almost think having the archives page indexed with only titles linking to the article would be a good idea. Thoughts?

  6. Jason Neuman on June 26th, 2007

    I think that just the article titles are best.

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