This morning a friend of mine called me because a ton of his pages were now showing up as supplemental results when he did a google site search. You may be asking yourself why is that bad? Well, in this case they were the first pages showing up in a search. Again, you may be asking yourself so what? The supplemental results were created for a new, separate index that google will search if it fails to find a match in the main index. The fact that any of his pages were showing up there meant that google felt that some of his own pages weren't a good match for his site. Google also announced that they have no plans to incorporate that index back into the main either. The amount of pages google has indexed for you is very important. These are all of the pages that could potentially show up in the rankings when someone searches on the web.
To see how many pages of your site a search engine has indexed, use this command in the search bar: site:www.yoursite.com or site:yoursite.com . When doing a site search command on google for Active Rain, it shows that 1,510 pages have indexed already. Very impressive when you consider the age of the site.
One of the things I recommended to my friend was to bolster his internal links. He had very few on the effected pages, which is why google could be confused about where to place the page in their results. Internal linking is one of the things I'll be going over in the next couple of weeks in my SEO blog series. One of the biggest reasons a page is returned as supplemental is due to similar content. Keeping the same title and meta tags for every page on your site is one of the worse things you can do. Sometimes just fixing that will get your pages re-included in the main index. -Charles
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