Supplemental Results Read

[Smuck]

This is a good read regarding supplemental results. Here is an excerpt:

Why does google put pages in the Supplemental Results?
I’ve been able to identify 3 main reasons:
1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.
Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

The link for the entire article is here: http://www.jimboykin.com/damned-to-g...ental-results/

[VRI]

Well, I'm sure it's a good article but from what I've seen in the areas that I follow... 90% of the supplementals are from low link strength. Being too far from the flow... or not having enough juice to start with.

It was also born out in the blog quote from Matt Cutts that was posted here a week or so ago. Can't seem to find it now though.

[ColoradoHomeHelper]

How can you tell if a page is in supplemental results?

[Micheal Pannell Realtor]

it say in google
if you look up your site

[judyo]

I agree with VRI. There are many sites going supplemental that don't have dupe content, pages with no content or orphaned pages.

Colorado, you do the site:www.domain.com search command and the pages in the supps show "supplemental results" in green print next to each page url.

[ericbramlett]

3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

Should I link to it in more than one place? I'm thinking in terms of Sitemap - should I have a link to EVERY page in my Sitemap?

[Smuck]

Should I link to it in more than one place? I'm thinking in terms of Sitemap - should I have a link to EVERY page in my Sitemap?

Yes. Unless you specifically do not want the page indexed. Here is another good read on the issue: http://www.seobook.com/archives/001545.shtml

In this article, there is a discussion on Google being at fault. And that the error will correct itself.

[judyo]

That article was written on March of last year. When this first started many sites were thrown into the supps (sometimes every page but the home page). I do believe by this time that has been straightened out (at least for most sites).

Now any pages that are supplemental most likely have a reason for being supplemental. For my supp pages I've been told I need to garner more deep, quality links into my site.

[VRI]

Should I link to it in more than one place? I'm thinking in terms of Sitemap - should I have a link to EVERY page in my Sitemap?

This is absolutely a must IMO for any site having any issues with supplemental listings! Build a site map that links to all of the pages that you want indexed and link to the site map site wide.

From my observations this is why so many saw there link pages being dumped. Everyone saw link pages as supplemental and figured Google was just tossing the pages because of the footprint or format. It was, in most cases, because the link pages were supported by a single home page link which in turn was the sole support for the 50 or so pages in the link directories.

There are some exceptions but I think that those of you that had been supporting the link pages with other internal links or getting a few external links to the directory or the pages didn't see any changes.

[Smuck]

For what it is worth, and I am not sure if this had anything to do with it, but I have close to 400 pages and none are supplemental. I have a snippet I've placed on every page except the home page. I am regularly changing the snippet, thus creating a changed page on every page in my site. The snippet is simply a list of links at the bottom of the page. You can see it here: http://www.joelane.com/creditcare.php

Not sure if this snippet had anything to do with the supplemental page thing, but it is a method of changing the text on all pages at once. I would be curious to what others think about the idea.