Web Design
How to Get Out of the Google Supplemental Results
By Mihaela Lica
Sat, 13 Jan 2007, 03:47 PST

Google’s supplemental results are a problem for many webmasters. The question “how to get out of the supplemental results?” arises quite often in forums, and so far there aren’t too many clarifying articles on that matter. There is but one thing anyone who ever had his/her website listed in the supplemental results already knows: once you’re in, it’s not easy to get out. The good news is that there are ways.

Improve Your Content

If you ever read in forums that you should add a new page to your website each day to make Google place more weight on your site, that might be an imprudent technique. Fast growth might damage website credibility. Websites are not blogs! There’s no need to add thousands of pages to make the search engines believe that “something happens”, that your website “is the resource”, with “constantly new content” (read “daily”). The “something happens”, “is the resource” and “constantly new content” techniques are not bad when they make sense. But if they are used to create pointless pages, they’ll not even come close to their initial purpose. So what you need to do is to create the best pages on the Web for your niche. Fewer pages, with real quality content (richer texts), often rank higher. “Thin” pages, written solely for rankings, tend to go supplemental.

Better Linking Strategies

Good linking helps. This is what any SEO advises. Link exchanges don’t work as they used to. This technique was abused, and while it’s not “black hat SEO” yet (unless you link to a link farm or other bad neighbor), it is “gray hat”. This means that Google will not technically penalize your website, but it will not give those links any weight either. And you’ll end up complaining: “why don’t I have higher rankings and a higher PR when I have so many links?”. To avoid this you should try other strategies that will generate better inbound links.

For example, you could dive into the social media for better links: target bloggers and social bookmarkers to comment on your products and services by building link bait strategies. A good article (let’s say “101 Linking Strategies”) will attract attention and determine people link to (or bookmark) that page. You’ll probably find your article mentioned in forums, blogs, discussion groups, social bookmarking sites and so on.

PageRank Matters

To get out of the supplemental results you’ll need back links from websites with a good PageRank. For Google PR is one of the trust factors, but not the only one. Pay attention how you get web pages with a higher PR to link back to you. Google devaluates more and more inbound links that come as a result of purchasing, giving more weight to links that carry editorial value (links within the context of an article). The age of the site linking back to you matters as well. The longer on the Web, the better. New websites, even when they have high PRs, might not be very helpful.

Improve Your Website

Redesign if you must. Maybe your code is too cluttered and the Google bot cannot scan the pages correctly. Get rid of tables and store CSS in external files. It will not hurt to validate your pages. Yes, valid codes matter. Don’t compare your website with sites like Google or Yahoo! (MSN validates!) Yes, they don’t validate, but honestly… do they need to? Remember that the search engines bots cannot always parse HTML effectively. This might hurt in your rankings. So it would be better for the quality of your website to have a valid HTML or at least no serious validation errors.

A better design makes a better website. If your site is branded, unique, navigable and functional, visitors will come back over and over again, link back and bookmark. Word of mouth will bring some traffic too, and while it might take a while till you get out of the supplemental results, your business will not lose so much in terms of revenue.

Pay careful attention to the internal linking structure. For example if your main page appears on the Google main index but the rest of the pages appear in the supplemental results, add links to these pages on the main page. If you must link to less important pages on your site, use rel=”nofollow” as too many links on the indexed page might damage your site too.

When you link to other websites you are giving away from your PR. So try not to have too many links to external sites on one page.

A clearly displayed link to a sitemap will help visitors find faster what they look for. A sitemap also helps the search engines scan your web pages effectively.

Meta Titles and Descriptions

This is probably a technique you already know: re-write your Meta titles and description for each page of your website. These two tags should describe accurately each page. Some of the keywords you use in these tags should be related with the content of the pages, but avoid keyword stuffing and other spamdexing tricks. The Meta description shouldn’t be too short. A 50 characters description is too short. That’s good for a title, not for a description!

Well, follow these steps and you’ll eventually get lucky. And while you have your pages in the supplemental results, don’t despair! There are enough SEM techniques that will bring you revenue till your pages are out of Google’s supplemental index! Just keep improving your website and you’ll see results.