Recently a site I had that was ranking quite well in Google suddenly lose its ranking completely. It is still indexed in Google but most pages are coming up supplemental. I have scoured the net looking for reasons why and have attempted to fix up most of them.

I have implemented a 301 redirect to redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com/. Should I also redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com/ ? If so what code do I need to do this?

If it's that "affiliate blog" site, you probably won't get all of your pages out of the supplemental index no matter what you do unless you nofollow the links and provide original reviews of the products/services (something 99.99999% of people don't do no matter what.) That, and your page keeps refreshing. That could be part of it too...at the very least, it's bad user mojo.

Yes, you should redirect www.domain.com/index.html to www.domain.com . As far as pure HTML code, I don't think there is any, but there are a bunch of answers here:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/canonicalization-update/

No, that's not the site I am having the problem with.

You have to be extremely careful when trying to remove index page references from URLs by redirecting. You can end up in a locked loop.

Adam is correct there is no HTML method of accomplishing this.

Your first job should be to ensure that you never link to the index pagename in your own site navigation, that is where the issue starts.

The quickest and safest way is to have a different default document name for the server to deliver, then allow the references to "index.html" to 404 out. Make sure you have a custom 404 setup to catch the visitor clicking on existing links

<added> BUT it is unlikely that this is the real cause of your "supplemental" status </added>

IMO.. there is no need to redirect the index.html. its not seem to serve the purpose.

Okay, so what is the site?

Should have told you the site to begin with. Would have made things a bit easier. It is www.eyecontactguide.com. Just wondering if some of the inbound links are causing the problem. I try to avoid spammy type links but one search engine I joined up with had a link popularity type offer (which I didn't really want anyway) and some of the links are from what look like spam type sites like gambling sites and so on.

Any opinions will be most helpful.

Originally Posted by jenyfari

Should have told you the site to begin with. Would have made things a bit easier. It is www.eyecontactguide.com. Just wondering if some of the inbound links are causing the problem. I try to avoid spammy type links but one search engine I joined up with had a link popularity type offer (which I didn't really want anyway) and some of the links are from what look like spam type sites like gambling sites and so on.

Any opinions will be most helpful.

As far as I'm aware (someone please correct me if I'm wrong) search engines don't penalise you for "bad neighbourhood" inbound links because you have no control over them (generally speaking).

In terms of problems arising from "bad apples", it matters more about where you link to rather than whether they're linking to you.

A good starting point for making your site more search engine friendly may be: http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=ht...tactguide.com/

I also notice you have a nice collection of layout tables making it harder for spiders to reach your page content (they have more html to crawl through before finding anything worth looking at).