Trying to Get Out of Supplemental Hell

Would moving site to a new domain help?

[srmark]

Here's the situation - I have a forum which was poorly optimized for SEO. The result? Google didn't like it, got confused, and said that it was nothing better than a supplemental index type site.

I have spent the last few weeks shoring up the forum software to make it a rock-solid SEO-wise. However, being that some of the URL's are going to change, I really don't want to bother with 301 redirects and waiting a year or so for Google to update their listings.

So, I registered the domain name in its .net format, and am thinking about having Google drop the old domain entirely and using robots.txt to keep Google out. Both domains will still be accessible, work off the same database, but will/should be separate in Google's eyes.

Does anyone think this will work, or am I just wasting time?

[SuddenlySara]

Think you will be making a much bigger mess starting over with a .net domain for both Google and your users. Keep the .com and fix.

[g1smd]

Forums splurge multiple instances of "duplicate content" for content pages (multiple URLs for the same piece of content), and oodles of pages that should never be indexed (log-ins, send PM, start new thread, reply to post, and so on - because all they say is just "error you are not logged in"), so you have your work cut out to make things right.

Once things are fixed up, you should see a massive improvement within a few weeks or so.

[g1smd]

>> Can someone explain to me why deleting supplemental pages could help recover your ranking? <<

It will not help at all to do that, because for supplemental pages that start to return a 404, Google continues to show a supplemental page for that URL for the next two or three years.

Additionally, if the page that was deleted is not supplemental at the time it was deleted, then Google pulls a recent cache copy out of somewhere a few weeks after the deletion, creates a new supplemental result for that deleted page, and then shows it for a year or two, to help people who otherwise would have no access to that information that was "deleted".

[leadegroot]

I agree with what g1smd said.
In addition, if you start again with a new domain name you then have the sandbox to deal with, and thats *worse* than supplemental!

I would stick with the old one, make the changes to new pages and 301 the old. Google is moderately good at changing 301s, I've done it a couple of times - its yahoo that seems unable to beleive them :(