Silent Killer - Supplemental Index

changing page names creates content penalty

[greenfrog]

About 4 months ago a SEO changed some page names using a URL rewrite and it has killed my SERPS. Google even today, 4 months later still has these old pages in the Supplemental Index and will not let them go even though the pages haven't existed for many months.

I feel confident that this has led to the demise of my SERPS by triggering some sort of penalty, probably duplicate content penalty for the affected pages.

Can anyone give advice on how to clean up my mess?

[diamondgrl]

The old pages should send out a 301 Permanent Redirection error for the search engines to recognize the change properly. Are they?

[jdMorgan]

> The old pages should send out a 301 Permanent Redirection

Check your old URLs using the WebmasterWorld server headers checker [webmasterworld.com], and make sure the server response code is 301-Moved Permanently

Yahoo is having problems handling 301 redirects correctly. At last report, they were "working on it." Despite that, the 301 is the correct thing to do. See RFC2616 [w3.org], HTTP/1.1 protocol specification, server response codes.

Jim

[greenfrog]

I just ran one of the removed pages on the server headers checker program and got this response. All of the missing pages give a 404 error code. Should I put the pages all back up with a 301 redirect, will this have a better chance of solving the problem?

HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found
Connection: keep-alive
Date: Thu, 02 Sep 2004 19:35:03 GMT
Server: Microsoft-IIS/6.0
X-Powered-By: ASP.NET
X-AspNet-Version: 1.1.4322
Cache-Control: private
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Content-Length: 2045

If 301 is the best method for solving this....can someone help me with the necessary 301 error code.

Thanks for the help!

[stevenmusumeche]

You need to put those pages back up and use 301 redirects. The code we give you will depend on your setup. Are you using the Apache web server?

[Airportibo]

(almost) all you need to know
[google.com...]

[greenfrog]

The server is Microsoft.

Also, I have tried the google remove page and all of the requests were denied. The requests were probably denied because the pages don't exist on the server, and they returned 404 error codes.

[webdude]

With IIS, right click the page you wish redirected (in MMC) and go to properties. Under the file tab click the "A redirection to a URL" radio button. Fill in the complete URL including the [....] Click the checkbox for "The exact URL entered above" and "A permanent redirection for this resource."

This will give you a 301 redirect.

[steveb]

Link to the 404 locations from high-ish PR pages. Let the bot find that the pages no longer exist.

Supplemental pages tend to stay because the bot doesn't find that they are gone, that is, there are no links to the old page so Google doesn't know it is 404.

You can still do the 301 ideas, but your easiest move is to first just link to the 404 locations.

[wanna_learn]

can anybody tell why on earth this supplemental results exist?

I had a site complete nuked in may last week by Google. There was not a single page in index. The site can now be seen on SERP with supplemental tag for most of unpopular KWS.

any solution to get rid of this supplemental tag?

[abates]

Supplimental pages drop out eventually. I had several hundred appear in a search for my site, but they gradually dropped out over the course of a few months. Oddly the number always seemed to diminish in batches on Friday night...

[wanna_learn]

But not the case with me
These Pages were disappered from index/DB altogeather but now appearing as supplemental Results.

[greenfrog]

For my site, google very recently increased the supplemental index in a dramatic fashion. The have populated it with pages that have not existed for over 4 months.

This started happening for me about 1 month ago.