Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
By when can I expect results or no results? When will I know for sure that the changes that I have made are not working?
Please do help!
After I began to fix the problem, it took a week before anything was added back in. Most of the time, a few pages are added per day. For a week or so each month, a bunch are added every day. Then it slows back down to a few a day.
It is important to identify the reasons so you can apply the correct fix.
Some things can't be fixed. They just are.
When will I know if my changes have helped? How much time should I wait?
What are the reasons for going supplemental that cannot be fixed?
Thanks!
Now some people did make changes in that period hoping to improve things. Others did not, but both saw their urls lose the Supplemental Results tag. Cause and effect is very slippery in a situation like this. And the strange thing is that in some cases at least, none of this shifting around changed their Google traffic situation.
I'm personally done with obsessing about Supplementals. If a supplemental tags brings umy attention to something I can improve, then I do it for the sake of the site and its visitors. If I really made an improvement, then there's a decent chance I'll see an improvement in Google. I even know of a url that is still Supplemental but comes up #1 for a decent search query and delivers regular traffic.
I think the Supplemental tag is something like a blood sugar reading on your lab test. It certainly can be an indicator for you and your doctor, but it takes a whole lot more information than that to make strong pronouncements about your health.
My problem is that I think I actually made some mistakes with the url and the content on the pages. So I might be in the supplemental index for a good reason. Like "duplicate content"!
But, now I have fixed all those problems and use 301 redirects and everything. So, I am wondering, how long goole takes to see my site again and decide that it is "main index" worthy?
Supplementals were my fault, also, having made all titles and descriptions in the metatags similar. Content on the pages was not unique enough from page to page, also (lots of boilerplate). For my other sites, on which I haven't yet done any fixes other than the metatags, only about 10 pages came back into the main index.
Most of the pages on my site (the one that I've worked on) are PR0, the best page being the home page, at PR4. A few are PR1 or PR2. Despite the PR0, most are now non-supplemental.
Traffic has doubled since going from 2 pages in the main index to 400+ pages in the index. Maybe more importantly, the quality of the traffic is better. For some reason, before cleaning things up there were more referrals from Google's images search in foreign countries than from the U.S. I was receiving more referrals from MSN than from any particular Google server (not that this indicates low quality, it is just unusual as google has been the top off-site referrer for years).
I did not really notice a reduction in sales overall, as most sales come to this site due to an intuitive domain name and good ranking for keywords in the domain, which hasn't changed. I did notice a reduction in sales on the affiliate products pages and adsense (this income is not the primary income for the site).
I solved most of the duplicate content issues and had other sites link to me to boost page rank.
My pages took *1 HOLE YEAR* to get out of supplementals. But man, when they're out of it there is a big boost in visitors!
My advice is to avoid copying contents from other sites (eg: wikipedia, etc.) and build original quality contents.
Our site has been around for 6 years or so and has a TBPR of 4.
The only changes that we've recently made are 301'ing a few related sites (two months ago) and adding new content pages (with unique hand written text) on a daily basis.
Some people have mentioned making changes to get their content out of the supplemental index - could you explain any successful changes you've made so that we can try? Please.
Thanks
Mick
Supplemental Results [webmasterworld.com] - what exactly are they?
Duplicate Content [webmasterworld.com] - get it right or perish
Duplicate Content [webmasterworld.com] - comments from Google's Adam Lasnik
Thin Affiliate Pages [webmasterworld.com] - with comments from Google's Adam Lasnik
The most common problems I've seen historically have been:
1. Duplicate URLs for the same content
2. Near duplicate or "thin" page content
3. Duplicate titles and meta descriptions -- especially on low PR pages
4. Low PR pages in general, often cause by long "silo" click paths as the only access to the pages, which can be addressed with inbound links
This is the first time we've headed into the supplemental index situation so we're (I'm) both confused and concerned about it.
We think that the same thing is happening to one of our competitors as well. Their pages that have already gone supplemental seem to have unique well written content in them and we can't see why either their site or ours has 'suddenly' gone supplemental.
Some of our pages that have gone in there are about a month or so old and had been previously ranking well. (we knew it was too good to be true!)
I think i was made supplemental because of some of the mistakes with multiple urls to same content issue! But now i have rectified that.... provided a fresh site map to Google....used 301 redirects on the old links so i am waiting for Google to take me in again!
When will it happen ohh, great Google God?
