SEO Tycoon

**bushib** · 04-07-2007, 06:23 PM

Hi there,

I want to know that did you ever stuck in the Google's supplemental index and how did you come out of it.

Regards
bushib

**Paz** · 04-09-2007, 10:58 AM

This is a very difficult question actually and depends how you ended up in the supplemental index in the first place.

If you think you're there because of similar content on too many pages then you'll have to roll your sleeves up. Sometimes it can be enough to re-write titles and descriptions actually, but most of the time you'll likely have add fresh text to the body content too. Any web page increasingly has to justify it's presence in Google's main index and you should look at your supplemental pages and ask yourself if they really contribute anything to your visitors or are they just cookie clutter.

One site I blocked 1000 99% identical shopping basket pages with a NOINDEX tag and saw substantial improvements in indexing and ranking two months later. One problem you have with supplemental pages is that they are by definition low priority pages for Google. Any changes you make to pages can take a long time to show up because they aren't crawled so often as pages in Google's main index. I have a feeling that a robots.txt exclusion would have worked a lot more quickly in removing duplicate content, but that wasn't an option with this site.

If I have a deep page I really need back in quickly I get a link directly to it.

Cheers,
Paz.

**john546** · 04-22-2007, 04:19 AM

Thanks for the info. You probably will also go supplemental if your site has been penalised. It does happen.

**handsome rob** · 04-22-2007, 07:12 PM

I've got a blog post up right now about how I pulled several hundred pages out of the supplemental index for a client's site.

**affiliatekb** · 04-26-2007, 06:33 PM

I had over 3,000 pages in the supplemental index.

Contrary to what a lot of people say, being stuck in the supplemental index is not a penalty (although it could be considered a type of filter). Regardless, though, its not a good thing.

Being stuck in the supplemental index simply means that Google does not consider your site important enough to put in their primary index. This could be for several reasons:

1. Maybe your site isn't worthy of the regular index
2. You don't have enough inbound links to your site
3. Google is confused by your site, causing pages to appear unimportant that really are important

That list is not comprehensive.

You should do a full analysis of your site from an SEO standpoint. Look at your navigation first (this is one of the most common fallpoints into supplemental, IMO), check to see if you have duplicate pages (you can have dups without even trying), and, most importantly, figure out who is linking to and whether or not those pages linking to you are important.

For the record, I've gotten sites out of the supplemental index in two weeks, and some sites out of supplemental after 1+ year. It really depends on the size of your site, what's wrong, and how quickly you can make changes.

**handsome rob** · 04-26-2007, 11:55 PM

Another tip which I didn't mention in my blog post because it didn't relate to that case:

Delete your google sitemap. Let them rediscover your pages.