Changed title, now old SERPS have gone supplemental

[Nostalgic Dave]

I'm a newbie, but have been picking up a lot of great info from this site and appreciate all the info that you guys share on a daily basis. I thought I'd contribute a bit with an observation I made today regarding the Supplemental Index. Maybe this is old news, but I thought I would share it at least for the other newbies on board.

Recently I made changes to my website that has been ranked in Google very well for many years. The title on all my pages were the same "mysite name - my site description", regardless of what product a user was looking at. The site is completely driven by an ASP application and drawing its data from a database. The site uses a template, which is the reason for the same title on all pages.

Well, I thought I'd try to get a little edge in the search positioning by adding the product name to the title. So now the title reads "mysite name - product name - my site description". To accomplish this I dynamically change the URL using info from the database.

Old URL = "www.example.com/index.asp?item=32".
New URL = "www.example.com/index.asp?item=32&title=Blue%20Widgets".

Works great! Well now that Google has re-indexed my site, ALL the old pages with the old titles have gone supplemental and most are replaced with the new version. These old links still work of course, but are no longer linked anywhere directly from my website.

Does Google now see these as out-dated, or are they considering it duplicate content? The updated versions of those links that are in the index are not supplemental.

[edited by: tedster at 11:01 pm (utc) on Nov. 18, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]

[steveb]

Seems clear duplicate content. That's quite mess to clean up now.

[Nostalgic Dave]

But is it even really a problem? The old URLs are not even linked from my site any more, they are out of date. The new URLs which are mostly now indexed by google are NOT supplemental. Surely Googles algo is smart enough to see that I'm not linking dupe content on my site, and that the changes are just an update. No?

[RonnieG]

... ALL the old pages with the old titles have gone supplemental and most are replaced with the new version. These old links still work of course, but are no longer linked anywhere directly from my website.

...The updated versions of those links that are in the index are not supplemental.

The old pages with old titles in supplemental is normal and not a problem as long as the newer versions are now in the main index. The old versions will stay in supplemental for a year. However, if any of the old urls and new urls both work, and both point to the same content, without 301 redirects, you have a dup content issue with those. All of the old urls should have 301 redirects to the corresponding new url. That might be a good thing to do in any case.

[edited by: RonnieG at 1:00 am (utc) on Nov. 19, 2006]

[tedster]

Your impulse to have a unique title for each page is right on the money. But your technical approach here can create a big problem. What happens if you decide to tweak a title another time - you would need to change the URL again? All your valuable history and built-up trust for the old URL would be wiped out!

The old URLs are not even linked from my site any more

But how about links from other sites? And from what you described, it sounds like the old URLs still resolve directly -- that is, the URL stays the same and it does not redirect in order to find the content. If so, this approach used over time can really hurt you.

Only one URL should point to any given content, and yes, the query string is part of the URL. I would try to have the old URL point to the new URL through a 301 redirect, or have it return 404 Not Found.

And use a CMS that lets you edit both the title and meta descriptions directly. Using a query string is getting much too complicated.

[Nostalgic Dave]

Tedster, yes the old links still work. The new tag on my URL defining the title is purely optional. If no title is defined, the title goes to default but the page still displays the same, so any old links out there would still work. It would be very difficult to code something to cull out the old URL's, since some URLS do not have the "&title" in them but still need to be valid. I'm not sure what you mean by using a CMS to edit title and description tags, but I'll look into it. If I abandon this new means of title tagging and do it via other means, then I guess I could do a 301 on any URL with "&title" in it... gahhh, I had no idea this seemingly GOOD change could cause such a problem!

[tedster]

CMS = Content Management System, essentially the function that your "ASP Application" is serving.

You want to be able to edit your title element directly, without needing to change the query string every time. A database can certainly hold a field for "title", right? Then there's no trouble telling the script where to pull that content. And ditto for the meta description.

[steveb]

You should 301 any old pages to new pages, or even the same dumping ground page. If you just abandon pages you'll lose respect froma search engine. Why should they care about your pages if you care so little about them that you sometimes abandon them?

[Pirates]

Just wanna say Steveb comment OUTSTANDING!

[Nostalgic Dave]

Thanks for the help guys, I'm working on a fix right now. Not goona be as bad as I thought. Should be interesting once this is fixed to see how this effects my ranking and traffic.

CMS, ahhh got it. My application is home brew and im constantly improving it to fit my specific hobby niche. Only recently have I been researching SEO and affiliate marketing... wow I was missing the boat!

[g1smd]

You really should have kept all of the old URLs and just changed the title and description information for those pages.