Any serious webmaster will frown when they see parts of their site has been moved to the Supplemental Index. What happened? What did you do to deserve such treatment from Google? You are not the only one. Lots of webmasters are having to re-analyze their sites due to the Supplemental Index. Take a look at these few items and see if they apply to your site:
- Duplicate Content: Do you have either copied content taken from another site or content of your own repeated on other pages of your site? If so, remove the copied stuff. Google likes unique content and you will be penalized for copying.
- WWW versus Non-WWW:Some search engines may view yoursite.com and www.yoursite.com as being two different URLs. This will divide any link popularity between the two 'versions' and can also be seen as duplicate content (Two different URL's with identical content!) You can prevent both from being indexed by use of a 301 redirect. Adding this to your .htaccess file may fix this problem:
- Index.html versus /:Same as the previous point. Is Google indexing your site under http://www.yoursite.com/index.html and http://www.yoursite.com/ ? If so, the same rule about duplicate content may apply. Instead, choose how you want it to appear and redirect it. Once again here is some code to paste into your .htaccess file.
- Meta Tags:Are your meta description tags unique for each page? They shouldn't be the same for each and every page. Change them.
- Links:Get quality incoming links. Avoid spammy links. Everyone should already know this one.
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [L,R=301]
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /([^/]+/)*index\.php\ HTTP/
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^(([^/]+/)*)index\.php$ http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
There are other factors that Google considers in addition to the ones listed such as website and domain age. Start with the ones listed above and make changes as necessary. Getting out of the supplemental index has been stated by some observers to take weeks to at least one year, if the issues that put them there are corrected.
