Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
[edit] I came back after a break and could not repeat what I though I saw earlier - either (1) It was just flukey results or (2) I was missing the - in front of the inurl... It looks like things are working OK now [/edit]
I'm trying to get a handle on how bad the supplemental index issues are for my sites. (a lot of it is my fault - lousy descrtiptions etc). I'm trying to establish a baseline to see if I'm heading in the right direction.
I have 14 sites I'm working with. I went to each site in google and did a
site:www.mydomain.com
and
site:www.mydomain.com -inurl:www
For some of the sites, the -inurl:www caused only NON Supplementals to show. For the other sites, the -inurl:www showed JUST the supplementals.
I did go in through the webmaster tools about mid october and set all of the sites to be www as the preferred domain.
I don't fully understand the canonical www issue. However, my guess is that what I'm seeing has something to do with canonical issues(-inurl:www showing just supplementals for some domains and everything but supplementals for others)
By the way, I'm not doing any redirects (except for a couple). The sites that are doing the best (least % and amt of supplementals) are those sites that are the oldest - A couple of years.
Anyway, I'd appreciate any thoughts. I'm going to come back after dinner and look at this again to double check what I'm seeing. I thought the flip flopping of supplemental/non supplemental to be a bit odd.
thanks
cg
The -inurl:www search should show only URLs without a www in them, but it often does not.
If often also shows "historical supplemental" (*) results for www pages, and/or supplemental www URLs for pages that are now 404 or are redirects.
It is important that you know the HTTP/1.1 status code for each URL that you can see in those results (200, 301, 404) in order to interpret exactly what is happening.
As a bare minimum all non-www URLs on your site should send a 301 redirect to the equivalent www version of that URL, to avoid "duplicate content" issues arising.
(*) Check earlier threads for full information explaining what this term means.
I guess those are the sites with NO redirect? You don't say whether those normal results were www or non-www URLs though, so it is hard to tell.
.
>> For the other sites, the -inurl:www showed JUST the supplementals. <<
Those could be sites that do have the redirect and are showing old non-www URLs that are now redirecting URLs. Those show for a year before they drop out of the index.
Those could be sites with or without the redirect that are showing "historical supplemental" results for URLs that still return 200 OK. Again, no clue as to whether those URLs were www or non-www.
.
You need to be aware of which URLs return 200, 301, and 404, status codes in analysing your results.
[edited by: g1smd at 1:04 am (utc) on Nov. 28, 2006]
So take what you see only as a starting point for looking into your site's situation, and do not assume that those results mean something in and of themselves. You need to join those results to your in depth knowledge of the specifics of your site.
Be sure to study this thread:
Supplemental Results: What exactly are they [webmasterworld.com]
I think the biggest problem in my case is (1) not enough text on the pages and (2) lousy meta descrtiptions.
Many of the pages are my own pictures with a minimal description. I'm going to start working on those to add more textual content. (voice to text really helps!)
The other thing is that when I was putting some of the sites up a while back, I was simply copying a page as a template, often keeping the descrtiption identical or nearly identical. I realize this is a problem and am fixing it as I go along.
Another thing I'm trying is that I'm changing my navigation from complete listings to back and next buttons. In other words, suppose I have a list of cities in antartica. Before I would have the navigation buttons for coldsville, really coldsville etc. I think this might have been causing duplicate issues especially with pages with very little content and a lot of sibling pages - the nav structure overwhelmed the content on the pages.
The one thing I am seeing repeated about the supplementals is getting backlinks. I'm going to make it a point to dig through the ww forum on link building (i forget the exact name right now)..
I believe the advice here was to not overanalyze the supplementals. I'm planning on diving into getting the content 'thicker'. However, looking at the numbers and seeing that 80% to 90% of my pages are supplemental really made me realize the impact of this.
Thanks again for the responses and tips. . I really appreciate it!
