What is SEO?

In google, you can see which pages are indexed (included in the search results) for your site by searching on site:www.domainname.com. (Note - no ’space’ between : and www should be entered.)

If all is well and your site has enough good links to it from other sites, you will see most or all of the pages indexed. For pages that are more than two or three clicks away from the home page to be indexed you will need a greater number of inbound links (links to your site), and links of higher quality. You should also try and have some deep links.

Sometimes it happens that when you run the ’site’ search above you will find that some (or all) of your pages are listed as ’supplemental’ results. These are pages that google have deemed to be less valuable, frequently because they believe they do not differ substantially from other pages, either on your own site or on other sites.

These pages will tend not to be returned in google searches, so you need to try and get them out of the supplemental index. There are a few methods that should be applied:

1. Ensure that all pages have unique ‘titles’ - ideally separately hand-written for each page, but if that is not possible (e.g. the titles are system generated) then ensure that there is at least a difference. For example, perhaps appending ‘-1′, ‘-2′ at the end of the title.
2. Slightly less important, but apply the same to the descriptions, headers and text. The goal is to have pages that appear as different as possible.
3. Get more quality links to the site as a whole.
4. Try and get some deep links to the site, and in particular to the supplemental pages, from related pages. This can be very efficient at getting pages out of the supplemental index.
5. Pay attention to the internal linking structure of the site: add a sitemap to the site so that all pages are within two clicks of the homepage. Link to some of the problem pages directly from the homepage. All internal links should be ‘text’ or normal links rather than graphic or javascript links - try and avoid flashy but complicated menu structures.
6. I also recommend that if you have a large menu system, you position this towards the end of the HTML code, and then position it correctly on the page using CSS. This avoids having a large amount of identical text at the beginning of each page.

There are some pages that it can be very difficult to get out of ’supplemental’ results. These include:

1. pages that consist of articles taken directly from article banks,
2. pages from Wikipedia and other open source information providers
3. online shops that consist of little but affiliate links

For sites or pages of this nature there probably isn’t an easy solution - certainly I don’t know of one The goal of supplemental results is in part to eliminate duplicate text, and if your site is built from duplicate text you are likely to have problems.

Sometimes the existence of a ‘duplicate text filter’ is questioned. My personal experience is that on one of my sites which had original content, except for about 20 useful articles that I also included, all pages are indexed but all the reproduced articles are in supplemental results.

Despite all your best efforts, you may still find that you have a problem in leaving the supplemental index. I have a site which google adamantly refuse to index or take out of supplemental, despite taking all the steps above.

In this eventuality, you can do little but wait, or change to a different domain name and move the information across. I strongly suspect there is a ‘gap’ somewhere in googles algorithm that a site can fall into, wrongly, and have great difficulty in getting out of, despite having no apparent problems.

The paradox with this situation is that you can spend months building links to the site first, to check that lack of links isn’t the problem, after which simply abandoning the domain name and the links and starting another is not a very attractive solution.