How Can I Get Out of Google's Supplemental Results? 4 Tips for Being Supplemental Free

By JT Palmer

“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.

About the Author

Justin Palmer has been involved in internet marketing for 5 years, specializing in search engine marketing for small business

His current project is C28.com, a specialty retailer of Christian apparel, Christian Hats and accessories.

How do you know if your content is duplicate? Try this tool: http://www.webconfs.com/similar-page-checker.php