Google adsense tags and supplemental results

[xjessie007]

Hi,
I have a question about Google supplemental pages indexing. I got hosed by Google this week, I had about 300 indexed pages last week, and suddenly it dropped to 40 today. Everything else is in supplemental pages. Researching what could have gone wrong, I thought about adding the

google_ad_section_start
google_ad_section_end

tags around every content that is not essential, such as stuff in the right and left margin. You can see what I did here, for example: <snip>, as a matter of fact, I write about that tag on this page. If you look at pg source, you can see these two tags everywhere but the main content. Would anyone think these tags could help to get pages out of the supplemental index?

Tx

--
<snip>

[edited by: engine at 4:54 pm (utc) on Oct. 1, 2008]
[edit reason] No specifc sites, thanks, See TOS Agreement [/edit]

[netmeg]

This is not an AdSense issue; if you've tanked in the organics, then you probably should have this moved to the Google Search forum.

The google ad section targeting has nothing to do with organic search results - it's for assisting Google in figuring out what kinds of ads to show on your page.

[m0thman]

... or not

Personally I've always found the section targetting tags to be as useful as a chocolate teacup.

[Receptional Andy]

Hi xjessie007,

As netmeg suggests, these tags will have no impact on your organic Google results, and you'll need to look elsewhere for a way to improve your pages' performance.

You'll find a number of useful threads on supplemental results within the Google Hot Topics [webmasterworld.com] section (under the 'Supplemental Index' heading).

However if you're pages are no longer in the index (and don't show up for direct searches) it's unlikely to be a supplemental index problem at all, but either a lack of links to your site, or an issue with penalties. It's quite unusual for pages to simply disappear entirely.

Note that there's also a current discussion about fluctuations in Google's site: operator results, if that's what you've used to identify the problem:

Site: Count Fluctuations - What causes this? [webmasterworld.com]

Incidentally, Yahoo does have a meta tag to exclude content (or they did at one point) but obviously that will have no effect on Google either.