by Aiden O’Neill

Have you have ever checked to see how much of your site Google has indexed by using the site:www.domain.com command? If so you may have been puzzled to see results that said ‘Supplemental Result’ after the website URL.
What is a Supplemental Result? Well, briefly it is an index of web pages that Google has determined do not belong in the regular search index. Wait a minute, not showing in the regular Google search results? That is a lot of potential visitors to your site just lost because your pages are no longer showing up in regular Google searches. What can be done to get yourself out of Supplemental Hell?

Site Age:First of all things to consider is whether or not your site is new and does not have many inbound links. If that is the case, don’t worry too much, just get out there and try to get some incoming links to your pages. Be sure to do this as ‘naturally’ as possible avoiding web spammers or ‘bad neighborhoods’.

Duplicate Content?: Are your pages lacking original content and just contain copies of information taken from other sites or do multiple pages contain similar content? Original and informative content is king and Google is very loyal to it. Get rid of copied content and write your own or pay someone to help.

URL’s with extensive variables: Avoid URL’s that contain multiple variables. If possible avoid variables longer than 2 characters and keep the amount to a minimum. For example, www.domain.com/file.php?itemnumber=2344 would be better served by shortening the variable to something like file.php?in=2344.

Link, Links, Links: I mentioned too few links earlier in the article and suggested increasing links. Well, remember to get good links, avoiding bad neighborhoods. Fewer quality links are better than a lot of low quality links. Too many low quality incoming and outgoing links will lessen Google’s trust in your page. Get quality links from quality sites, preferably from pages not already in the supplemental index.

Lastly, remember that Google seems to be constantly changing its algorithms and tweaking them. If your site is genuine and following Google’s webmaster guidelines, then your site has a good change of returning to the regular index.

About the Author

Aiden O’Neill is an editor for Consumerwebhostreview.com. where visitors can take advantage of savings on webhosting packages and utilize webtools like the Instant Domain Name Lookup Tool to dynamically search for a domain name.