How to Remove Your Blog from Google’s Supplemental Index
Written By TarikIn order to keep this blog running at optimal performance, I dedicate my weekends to performing routine site maintenance. This includes checking whether or not Google properly indexes all of my blog’s pages.
To my astonishment, 79% of my pages list in Google’s supplemental index. Google stores either duplicate or less significant web pages in the supplemental index, instead of placing them in the normal index.
How Do I Check My Blog’s Index Statistics?
Use the Supplemental index tool over at Seologs.com.
How Do I Get my pages back into Google’s Index?
Download the Wordpress SEO cure plugin.
Extra Safety: Upload a Good Robots.txt File
To insure Google crawls and blocks specific files within your website/blog, make sure to upload a good robots.txt file. Not so Boring Life wrote a good post on getting your blog out of the supplemental index.
How many pages did you have listed in Google’s supplemental Index?
*Update: My new posts keep falling into Google’s supplemental index. Does anyone have SEO experience out there?
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Post/Read Comments
May 27th, 2007 at 11:32 am
Great article- I’m still trying to figure out why I got booted off the Google Finance blog indexing back in January. I’ve managed to grow traffic significantly since then, but it is really holding the blog down somewhat.
Funny thing is, I had 0% in the supplemental index, which I guess is good, but really doesn’t make any sense to me. I’m truly stumped by the Google Finance blog issue.
Anyway, I would also suggest the Google sitemaps plug-in for WordPress, which I think has helped me somewhat. (http://www.arnebrachhold.de/2005/06/05/google-sitemaps-generator-v2-final)
I’m going to install the SEO plug-in now and if I see any changes, I’ll be sure to follow-up.
May 27th, 2007 at 5:05 pm
TJP,
Thanks for this tip. I checked out the supplemental index and I only had 4 pages on it. I guess that’s good news:-)
May 28th, 2007 at 12:15 am
Thanks for the tip. I’m just learning all this stuff and of my 77 pages 0 were in the supplemental index which is good.
I’ll have to keep an eye on that.
Thanks!
pf101
May 28th, 2007 at 5:32 am
@ Lucas
I was dropped from Google Finance as well. I think Google changed their algo, and eliminated a number of blogs from the Finance SERPs. Perhaps sending them an e-mail would get your site relisted in the results.
@ Super Saver
That’s great news! I’m down to 72% as of this morning. So far, the robots.txt file is working!
@ pf 101
Check it every week, and keep it to 0. I swear all these supplemental results snuck up on me in less than 1 week.
May 30th, 2007 at 8:36 pm
Wow, that worked like a charm! 0%!!
June 2nd, 2007 at 10:57 am
It worked for me too, but not to a 0%, I still got 5 in suplemental.
June 8th, 2007 at 9:26 pm
Great tips. Writing original content that people are willing to link to is probably the best advice that could be given to a blogger. Do that, and the supplemental index won’t be much of an issue - assuming they’ve chosen a common blog platform that’s easily indexed by Google.
June 12th, 2007 at 12:12 pm
I am so glad you blogged about these plugins. i am going to give them a try.
June 14th, 2007 at 7:03 pm
I have 39%! How long does it take for it to go to 0%?
June 17th, 2007 at 7:00 pm
@ MoneyNing
I’m not completely sure. A few of my posts made it back into the index last week, but the whole process moves at a snail’s pace.
As long as you continue to build backlinks to your posts, this complete process will work itself out.
And 39% ain’t that bad. Try 79% !
June 17th, 2007 at 8:17 pm
TJP: For whatever reason, in 2 days my supplemental index went to 0% with the total pages indexed being 200.
Now it’s back to 25% and I have no idea what happened with 212 total pages. It seems to jump around, but I will continue to monitor it.
June 19th, 2007 at 5:23 pm
@ MoneyNing
Index fluctuations are fairly normal. Google is a dynamic index, so things change often I presume.
If you want to speed up the process, it’s a good idea to reduce the amount of duplicate content across your web sites. For example, I link to my Top Commentators and sponsors from my home page, but use PHP to hide the external links on all of my blog’s inner pages.
This is just one example of reducing the amount of matching/duplicate content.
Let me know how it goes. Hang in there!
June 20th, 2007 at 6:50 am
Actually that’s a great idea!
I think I will look up to implement something like this when I get a chance. Thank you for the suggestion!