Blog SEO: Get Your Blog out of the Supplemental Index

Little blog SEO tip today, check to see if, like my blog, you have a “supplemental index problem“.

Check out my Google search result, as you can see I have about 106 pages in the supplemental index. Change chrisg.com to your own domain to test your own result.

So what is this “Supplemental Index”?

I like the answers from Tropical SEO best:

• The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.
• The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages with little trust.
• The Google Supplemental index is where they put web pages that aren’t going to rank for anything important.

Essentially Google throws your pages into the supplemental index when it is not sure what to do with it but doesn’t want to throw it away.

Why am I in “Supplemental Index” hell?

In a nutshell, it’s that old SEO monster, “duplicate content“. On my blog the internal linkage and archives were confusing Googlebot by throwing up the same content over and over. Graywolf did a wonderful video on this.

How do I get my blog out of “Supplemental Index”?

The standard answer seems to be to use Robots.txt to stop Google indexing junk pages. I didn’t want to add a robots.txt so looked for a plugin and came across a recommendation from Ogletree. He hacked a WordPress plugin that seemed ideal, but then in the comments I saw he provided some template code. Just what I was looking for. With a little tweak so it output a comment to explain what was going on, here is what I added to my header template just above the Title tag:


<?php
if((is_single() || is_category() || is_page() || is_home()) && (!is_paged())){
echo "<!-- ok google, index me! -->";
}else{
echo "<!-- google, please ignore - thanks! -->";
echo "<meta name="\"robots\"" content="\"noindex,follow\"">\n";
}
?>


What this does is outputs a special instruction to search engines to tell them to ignore a page if it is not the homepage, single article, static page, category, etc. My main problem was the date archives so hopefully this will sort it, we shall see!

Tags: blog, seo, wordpress, template, duplicate, content, tips