Most results supplemental

[futureX]

Just wanted people's opinions on this, its a relativley new site, there was content on the site previously but it changed completely in the past few months, and I have really launched the site and began updating it on a near daily basis. It is not a commercial site, so I have never been bothered too much about google traffic.

However I have been wanting to at least get it indexed well, for the past few weeks indexed pages have shown in google for a day then dissapeared completely and not reappearing. Now some pages are showing up, but all as supplemental. At the same time I did realise also that I had completely mucked up the HTML when porting the w3c valid template on the toeh CMS i use.

So I decided to sharpen up the template a bit and fix the errors, so I thought why not make it google friendly too, the things I have removed are as follows;

One of those "tag cloud" things at the bottom of every article page (contained about 100 links at the time all internal, it got out of hand lol) this was something I thought was good for users, but really thought google might not like it.

A <span> that had font-size: 0px; silly me for sticking one of those stat websites links on my site and not checking it (durr) google analytics and my daily webalizer dont cut it for me.

Obviously most pages are now 100% valid.

Took a lot of links from the navigation div.

Put nofollow on links that really werent important to the spidering process. (like digg/stumble links etc...)

[Quadrille]

If you were publishing links wholesale, chances are some were reciprocal.

Rarely a good thing, unless you KNOW they were all 'clean' sites.

Check your internal navigation with xenu, and check your meta tags, too.

Stats website links often include pop-up boxes and other cr*pware; they virtually never give you any stats you cannot get better from Google or your own host - or a quality system. Much safer to lose it.

Remove all pages with 'tiny' content - or merge them into larger pages; One para differences don't ring Google's bell!

[centime]

Do you attract inbound links

[futureX]

Do you attract inbound links

Yes, i have many inbound links to the homepage and to articles. Even one page which has around 5 - 10 inbound links pointing to it is supplemental.

I checked the index today, recently (couple of days old) cache of the site when i had at least removed the 0px span and the links at the bottom, it is not showing supplemental (at least not at the moment). So its looking better already.

With regards to stats, I dont like google analytics... Just not user friendly to me, so i've just dumped them all, its not really that important anyway at the moment.

I'll check the navigation, and thanks for the xenu link, that may help me with another little quirk i had too :)

I think the main thing was probably the 100+ links at the bottom of the page, i guess google saw all those links (same on every page) and thought wow thats a lot of code thats similar on all of these pages.

Thanks again for the tips :)

[Halfdeck]

Like already mentioned, I'd focus on interal link structure and inbound links. If your site has thousands of pages, that will also require more inbound links than a 2 page site.

Make sure you got your non-www/www index.html vs / as well as other types of cannonical issues squared away; they can water down the site.

[futureX]

www is redirected to non-www, i always do that on sites, I think i have the navigation as well done as possible. I guess I do need mroe inbound links too, but who doesnt. I have around 300 pages or so at the moment, and the current google index has 409 backlinks, though webmaster tools is showing ~2600 :)

So hopefully with the next PR update and new layout I will have better results. Again I'll still be looking into the site with xenu too.

I'm looking at the index again, a few more results are showing normal index now instead of supplemental, these are ones with the new optimised code, all the ones that are still supplemental are still cached with the old style.

I guess I've answered my own questions lol :)

[tedster]

The so-called "PR Update"will not make a difference. The real PR -- the kind that Google actually uses in tagging urls as supplemental -- is being updated continually.

The update is just a moment when Google exports their private PR data to the publicly visible toolbar. You don't need to wait for that non-event to see the status of your urls change, even though you might not yet know their new PR number.