Internet Business Marketing Ideas for Small Businesses

Everyone wants better search engine rankings and more organic search traffic. More traffic brings increased revenues and makes your site more valuable. But you won’t get that traffic if your site is stuck in Google’s supplemental results. Fortunately, we’ve rounded up the tips to break free!

What are supplemental results?

Google has two content indexes. Supplemental results are the B-list. As Google explains, there are fewer restrictions on the supplemental index.

But supplemental results show up after results from the main index. Also, Google doesn’t regularly update the content in the supplemental index. In other words, it’s not somewhere you want your pages.

Jim Boykin even coined the term “Google Hell” for this index. We clearly want to keep your pages out of there.

Are my pages in supplemental results?

A quick way to check your site is to enter this search at Google (instead of “example.com” enter your site’s name, such as “google.com”):

site:www.example.com * -asdf

You should now see some pages that say “Supplemental Result”

How to get out of Google’s Hell

Link to your pages. A page without a link to it is considered “orphaned,” and Google doesn’t look too kindly upon that. Spread the link love around your own site and get links from other sites. Don’t just focus on the home page, since every page needs its own Google juice. Google’s own Matt Cutts claims this is the best way out of supplemental results.

Remove duplicate content. To be on the A-List, you need unique content. If you stole somebody else’s content, shame on you. If you’re duplicating your own content, stop. WordPress users should use post excerpts everywhere.

Hunt down copiers. Somebody else might be duplicating your content, getting their own page in the A-List. You can use a service like Copyscape to find infringers and shut them down.

Put your robots.txt to work. This file talks to search engines. It can tell Google not to index parts of your site that might contain duplicate content, such as print versions of articles. In addition, there are several WordPress pages you might want to block.

Add more content. Pages with little or no content can end up in supplemental results, because Google doesn’t think they’re valuable. Beef up the content, impress Google, and provide more value to visitors.

Direct all requests to www. For most servers, “domain.com” and “www.domain.com” bring up the exact same page. Google could consider this duplicate content, since two URLs bring up the same page (for your entire site). A simple server tweak can redirect all requests to either www or no-www.

Write unique title and meta tags. If every page of your site is titled “My Site,” you’re not as well positioned for the A-List. Tailor every title, description, and keyword tag to the actual content for each page.

Make your site shallow. How many levels deep is your site? In other words, how many clicks away from the home page does it take to get to the lowest peon web page? If it’s more than 2 or 3, you’re not passing enough link juice to your pages. Simplifying the architecture will please Google and your visitors.

Use search-friendly URLs. Google isn’t a fan of long, complicated URLS. Make them reasonably short and actually readable. Instead of “domain.com/?adfasd=09098″ use “domain.com/page”

Report a page to Google. Andy Beard took an interesting approach to supplemental results. He reported one of his own pages to Google as a paid link. It ended up pulling all his pages out of supplemental results.

Create a sitemap & submit it. You’ve got to tell Google where your pages are, especially if you’ve changed things following these tips. Make a new sitemap and submit it for Google to index. You’ll find the webmaster tools helpful with this.

Any more questions?

What have we left out of this guide? Is something not clear? That’s what the comments are for.

We’d love to talk over issues you might have and help other people with supplemental results problems. Let the conversation begin.