Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Those pages no longer exist, and our IT guy set up 302 redirects (later 301) from those old hallway urls...he configured the redirects to search the site for the kws in the extension of the old site...in other words: if the old satic page was /widgetx.htm, the 302/301 redirect was to a sitesearch=widget%20x? etc url.
Fast forward a year or so.
site:www.domain.com command in Goog shows 7,000 pages indexed.
site:www.domain.com -www show 5,700 pages as supplemental. Are these in addition to the 7,000, or is it of the 7000?
A second issue:
Our site allows customers to sort products within subcategories via all sorts of refinements like brand, type, size etc. We have blocked robots from crawling the refinements (once a customer clicks any refinements, urls become rather long and it is questionable whether the boots would even follow them).
The bots are not restricted from the regular hierarchical category->subcategory->product path. However, the urls in the site map are different than what the site navigation path urls are. Both the navigation and site map are visible to bots/spiders.
examples:
regular site navigation url: www.domain.com/search_subcategory.do?categoryName=widgetC&categoryId=9000&refine=1&page=GRID
sitemap url for the same subcategory:
www.domain.com/siteMap.do?action=map2&catId=32
The site map version shows the same category description text as the navigation one..but has only text links to the products within this category whereas the navigation version contains images with alt attributes plus snippets of descriptive text for each product. Google seems to pick and choose whether it indexes the sitemap url, navigation path url, both, or neither.
Could this contribute to supplemental and or duplicate content woes?
Our competitors in our niche are far and away thin content sites and nobody has close to the amount of on page relevant and themed information for any given product. We are not newbies. We have many thousands of good IBLs gained over the last decade, and practice Mr Wall's and Brett Tabke's methods.
We are trying to figure out what it is that is still hampering our organic traffic and rankings post-new site implementation, and this is what I've come up with.
Am I on the right track? What next?
Honestly, I think a big factor in supplemental indexing is the length of the url.
That right there is what is killing you, duplicate content, two urls leading to the same content. Choose one or the other, then do some 301 redirects. My suggestion, look at both of the ways to get there, keep the shorter url and redirect the longer one.
Make them the same in both the regular navigation and the site map. Then you will have two links pointing to one product.
[edited by: trinorthlighting at 6:08 pm (utc) on Mar. 15, 2007]
Even better, if you can rewrite those urls to show something like www.domain.com/widgets/blue-widgets, you'll be even better off.
We use zen cart and zen has the code right.
Did you mean to say "if the content is NOT changed on the supplemental page, then it might take 2-6 months to update."?
I hope that's what you meant because I don't see why changing the content would contribute to such a long lag. From everything I've read lately, the key to dealing with supplementals seems to be :
1. more pagerank (to justify not being a supplemental I guess)
2. having more unique content (so if you have a supplemental page, you'd probably want to go back and edit the page to add more distinctive content)
Then, I hope that rankings are restored once the pages are indexed. Is it too much to expect better rankings once the supplementals are gone? My site is really old and I have a lots of unsolicited, one way, links.
