How To Stay Off Google’s Supplemental Index
There’s a scary place that many webpages go that people aren’t familiar with. This is a dark lonely place that is far from any search engine results page and rarely crawled. This place is called the Google supplemental index and it should be avoided at all cost.
What is the Google Supplemental Index?
The sheer number of webpages floating around the internet is astonishing. We all know that a large portion of these pages are filled with junk, scams, or duplicate content. Google created a second index of webpages in order to provide more accurate results and ease the load on their system. The supplemental index is filled with pages that Google crawled and indexed, but now feel are no longer important.
How the Supplemental Index Effects Your Website
Many people don’t realize how many of their pages are on the supplemental index. These pages will not rank highly regardless of how much time is spent on keyword research and placement. To top it off, the outgoing links from these pages carry little to no weight.
How to Check Which Pages are on the Supplemental Index
There is a little trick you can do to quickly check what pages on your website are in the main Google index. Go to your Google browser and type site:yourdomain.com/* and press enter. (Make sure to actually switch your website’s domain name in where it says “yourdomain.com”)
This will return the results from Google’s main index. If you see many of your webpages missing, it’s because they are actually listed in the supplemental index.
Internal Linking Won’t Keep You on the Main Index
I ran a test recently on the supplemental index. I created a webpage that was filled with unique content. I then interlinked it through every page on my site including the home page. I tracked the search engine results for certain keywords, as well as backlinks, and placement on Google’s main index.
My goal was to see if it was possible to keep the page afloat on the main index with internal linking alone. I succeeded in limiting the page to one lone nofollow external backlink. After one month I watched the page fall into the supplemental index. Every keyword this page had been ranking for immediately fell outside the top 200 on the same day it was dropped into the supplemental index.
How to Move Pages Back to Google’s Main Index
The test showed that even though internal linking and unique content are important, they’re not enough to save you from Google’s supplemental index. The only way to move back to the main index is through quality backlinks from other websites.
Blog Commenting Your Way Off the Supplemental Index
Blog commenting is one of the most effective ways to leave a credible link back to your website. Be sure to actually read the blog and leave a comment that is relevant and adds value. There are five website factors that are extremely important to keep an eye on when deciding what page to leave a comment on.
- 1.) Niche Industry Articles – There’s minimal benefit adding your link to a post completely unrelated to your website’s content. This signals a red flag to website owners that the comment may be spam. Even if the comment somehow makes it onto the post, Google can tell the two pages are unrelated and may devalue the link.
- 2.) “Dofollow” Websites – I know I just wrote an article on value being passed through nofollow links. This is true, but the fact remains that dofollow links pass much more value. Targeting websites that have removed nofollow tags will make pulling a page off of the supplemental index a much easier process. Here is a great resource for finding dofollow websites: Growmap Dofollow Resources
- 3.) Recently Posted Articles –Subscribe to the RSS feed of some of your favorite dofollow industry related blogs and then keep an eye on your Reader. When a new article is posted make sure to jump right over to read through it and leave a comment. Many times your backlink will be picked up on Google’s first indexing of the blog post.
- 4.) Pages on Google’s Main Index – If you would like to leave comments on older posts make sure they themselves aren’t on the supplemental index. Use the trick listed above to check the website you would like to comment on. Then make sure it is a page from the main Google index.
- 5.) Multiple Domains – Don’t leave all of your comments on different posts from the same website. Always shoot to have backlinks coming from multiple domain names. Ten links from ten different websites is astronomically better than ten links from the same website.
Take a little time to follow these steps to insure your favorite pages don’t get buried into the bottomless depths of Google’s supplemental dungeon.
Sep 08, 2010 | Comments: none
