Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
I was thinking about removing all the product pages for a few weeks as the site does not do much business as an experiment and then readding them at a later date.
any opinions - would the pages be removed, would the new pages not be supplemental?
cheers
I just realized that most of my website went google supplemental.
I beleive its because of dup content. I use all the item descriptions given to me from my manufacturers which most likely caused the supplemental results (I think).
My question is this. If I go in and change all the product content to original and unique (which will take me months), will this get me out of the supplemental and back into the main index?
If yes, how long do you think it will take?
I'd be a bit nervous of that, particularly in using different anchors within the navigation; IMO internal linkage can be overdone, I'm especially wary of overly long nav-bars using KW as anchors on pages with minimum content...
Inst G telling us to build sites for humans not SE! in that case how are the humans supposed to navigate around a site with no links referring them onto different sections of the site
Think about it for a moment a manufacturer lets say has 200 retailers. Lets say 125 of those 200 decide for now to use the manufacturer decriptions.
So what that means is that now 125 of those websites go supplemental for dup content.
Now that I know what might have triggered this, I will go ahead now and make changes to the product descriptions.
I just hope google will realize this and place me back into the regular index.
you think! every page on my site is unique it didn't stop g putting into supps
At the end of the day, Google doesn't want to list 125 sites that all sell the same stuff. They want to list a few of those and then other sites that sell similar stuff made by other people.
Imagine if a search for "cars" only showed Ford dealers, and excluded all other types of "car". It would not be a good SERP.
Your right and it makes perfect sense that google would think that way.
So I am trying to become more creative and unique with my content to appear different from all the others that are selling the same stuff.
If you sell Ford Cars and there are 5 million results, then sure dup content should be supplemental.
However if you sell Ford Cars but have some different to offer, explaining it with unique and orgininal content should get you back in the game (Main Index), right?
No it isn't, from your description your navigation is basically a site map, and having a site map on every page is, IMO, overdoing things...
my navigation is linked to every page (8 of them) so people can look around the site! - how else would someone find pages if they weren't linked from the nav
I'm not talking about a site here with 100's of pages! it has 8 in total which are the main products - I'm in the process now of adding sub pages but they will only be linked in from the secondary pages.
So I really fail to see how to can say my navigation is a SM?.
using one of the foolbar checking tools the PR is zero with the index 4
How many links do you have on your index?
If your home page is FBPR 4 and you only got 8 pages, there should be enough green fairy dust to go around for internal pages to be at least FBPR 1, unless you've got hundreds of links on each page.
If you've gained alot of links recently though, it may just be a delay in indexing and your site's already on its way out of the supplemental results.
building links is top of my list
sem4u
it makes you wonder if not waiting is the best thing to do - along with building & adding pages, G's little test of staying power for webmasters
Update
today my page count went from 8(basic site) to 16 every page now supp! (except Index) - the latest pages to be added are all article type pages so very heavy in word count and really not even that optimised. each of these new pages had much better descriptions as well
you know I'm wondering if supplemental sites are not G's way of telling us its sandboxed? until its either been in the system for a while and has solid external links pointing to the page & site
I really don't see pages going supp because of poor descriptions or content as these new pages have provide this, and still the site has nothing but 100% original content as I type it all in myself
Odd!
sem- How long did this take? What kind of site is it, and do the internal url's have their own ibl's?
>>>>you know I'm wondering if supplemental sites are not G's way of telling us its sandboxed?<<<<<
But one of them keeps climbing in the serps via the index page. Not really a typical action of sandbox. It could be a seperate sandbox of the interior ibl's due to lack of links and pr.
Not neccessarily...it's a circular thing...it could still come back around and bite him. Plus there maybe a manufacturer linking to him he is unaware of going to the product pages.
Don't forget...Matt Cutts said this is happening. I have tried to warn people but...oh well...
Not neccessarily...it's a circular thing...it could still come back around and bite him.
It probably will ;)
Each section page lists up to a 100 products with links to individual pages that also have unique content and urls. Probably 20-30% of these have been indexed since the changes and show the new unique url's, but remain supplemental.
Funny thing is that these supplemental pages actually rank quite well in the serps, when they dont they are below ppc sites and a few competitors. The supplemental pages also have toolbar pr.
Al
I am starting to believe another factor for supplemental has alot to do with age of a website. Just another form of a sandbox if you will.
Yes the other factors apply too such as dup content, old url's etc....However I have noticed several sites that appear to be very well optimized with no dup content and following all the rules but yet supplemental.
The only thing that I notice is these sites are all new, less than a year old.
It would appear that Google is giving benefit to those sites that have been around a while with good content as well as following rules an advantage to newer sites that are equal in good content and following the same rules but supplemental because of age.
I would work on four things:
1) Build more pages worth linking to
2) Get more eyeballs on pages you already built
3) Link build carefully but more aggressively.
4) Revise your internal linking structure so more PageRank flows to your supplemental pages. Even a TBPR 10 site (e.g. Google) can have supplemental pages if its internal linking structure doesn't do those pages justice.
These are all steps that are probably worthwhile for sites that are hobby or self-maintained informational or adsense type but what about the sites that represent small mom and pop - brick and mortar- businesses.
They do not have the expertise to do it themselves much less the understanding of the where withall of the whole mess. We spend a lot of time tracking and figuring this stuff out. They have a business to run.
Many also don't have the money to sink into something as extensive as these steps. Google's new formula of turning supplemental almost all of a site (that does not conform to it's standards of mega)has made the playing field on the internet grossly uneven. It will take deep pockets to compete.
What bothers me is that Matt and the boys seem to think this is okay. Go big business.
