Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Only their home page and one or two other pages are not supplemental. All the other thousands of pages are supplemental.
So it looks like google has dealt a blow to a load of the "authoritative" sites too!
All the stuff that I put fixes in for, 18 months ago, were fixed 6 months ago.
All the things that I put fixes in for, a year ago, were fixed a few weeks ago.
All the sites worked on in the last 6 months are partially fixed, and just waiting for Google to update what they show.
That seems a very long time to update a database, even one as large as Googles. A lot of companies could be out of business by than, over what could be a seemingly harmless, innocent mistake. Maybe they need 201 phd's over in that plex. ;)
This post explains exactly what I mean: [webmasterworld.com...]
You can see some better results within weeks, but the whole process takes one year.
Personally I think Serg and Larry should cap all the stuff they are doing and get the stuff they were well known for and respected for sorted.
A year ago, things were not like that, but following a checklist of half a dozen items, and many months later, all is well. In fact all the www pages were fully listed within a month. It just took a year for the redirected non-www stuff to drop out, and it was only a few months ago that a few dozen duplicate meta descriptions were noted and corrected.
The amount of time spent working on the site to fix all of those problems was less than two hours.
There are half a dozen Supplemental Results for some old product pages that were deleted a few months ago. Those return a 404 status, and a custom error page with full site navigation on. Google will drop them later. For now they still bring a small number of visitors who might buy something else. Those are the only supplemental results. That is not a problem.
The Supplememtal Results are listed last in the list in a site search.
Just checking again, and there is one Supplemental Result for a "live" page. It had a duplicate meta description, that was fixed a few months ago, but the page has a cache date from 2005 October. One link directly to that page from somewhere else will probably get that fixed.
A site:www.domain.com -inurl:www search lists ONLY the www Supplemental results; those that are for the various 404 URLs as noted above, and an extra TWO that represent "historical" www data for pages that are still "live". Those two www Supplemental Results are for some of the pages that have had their meta descriptions recently amended. All of the others that were amended have already lost their Supplemental status and appear ONLY in the normal index. Just these two still appear in both indexes at present.
Actually, I checked again, and I didn't look closely enough before.
Two of the "historical" URLs are actually for non-www URLs. These are now the only two non-www URLs that appear in any kind of site search for this site.
Those non-www URLs must have very recently re-appeared in the list. They have a cache date from 2005 October - which is about the time that the redirect was applied last year.
i wasn't expecting any non-www URLs to be there now, and I didn't look at the left-side of the URL initially.
There is only one "classic" URL that is a "historical" Supplemental Result. The exact same www URL appears both in a site:domain.com search as a normal result, and then again in a site:www.domain.com -inurl:www search as a Supplemental Result. That one, is one of those that had the meta description amended a few month ago. It's the only one left that still shows in both the normal and Supplemental indexes.
All the other URLs show only as normal results, or as Supplemental Results.
The other Supplementals are only for URLs that are 404 (www, 6 of those) or issue a 301 (non-www, 2 of those, as above).
[edited by: g1smd at 1:13 pm (utc) on Sep. 28, 2006]
All the things that I put fixes in for, a year ago, were fixed a few weeks ago.
All the sites worked on in the last 6 months are partially fixed, and just waiting for Google to update what they show.<<<<<<
You were lucky IMHO. We have tried all the "fixes" over the last 2 years and have had zero, big nada, success with any of them. Go ahead, try these "guesses" , but more than likely you will spend an inordinate amount of time and energy and see no changes at all. Until Google gives us some concrete facts on what is causing dismay within our sites, everything else is just hypothetical. For all you truly know about this, you could have made no changes at all to your site and arrived at the same placement that you are in today...am I right?
It is only in the last few months that I have become totally sure as to how this all works.
Only their home page and one or two other pages are not supplemental. All the other thousands of pages are supplemental.
As I mentioned before, there seems to be one DC where no matter what site you're looking at, everything but the first three SERPS are supplemental. It's been that way for over a week now. You might have hit that particular DC.
Does no meta description tag on some pages = the same description on pages?
Thanks,
john
There is no short cut. The job needs doing properly.
On Tuesday we noticed many of our competitors are showing the same supplemental results.
However, we have been able to watch our ranking on specific keywords disappear. 1st page, to 7th. I have not noticed any changes to our competitors.
If it was not for Yahoo and MSN we would be in trouble right now. I can only hope this is a fluke that will work itself out.
Has anyone else seen a huge drop in traffic?
This is definitely what I'm seeing when doing a site: search. When I do a normal search for any particular kw we normally rank for we come up number one, non-supplemental, though. We have all redirects in place and have had them for almost 2 years w/out any problems. I read in another thread that anytime almost whole sites show supp. bad things are on the way(supplemental overnight). Is this true or is this just a bad DC?
This is normal, except when the entire site turns supplemental.
Disallow some of those "alternative URLs for the same content" from being indexed by search engines and you will have fixed the problem.
See the stuff that I wrote about vBulletin just a few months ago.
See also: [webmasterworld.com...]
He also swaps settings around from time to time, and changes the default site in sitemaps.
