Supplemental Results and WordPress
I happened upon a curious trick to find out all your pages listed as “supplemental results” in google, and some other associated supplemental result tricks. A lot of you might already know these tricks, but I think reading the rest of this article might get you thinking about these supplemental results in a new way. I spent a good part of 1.5 hours playing with this stuff and reading up on it, which I try to summarize here.
To start off, let us look at the tricks.
Finding all supplemental results for your blog
The trick is to do a search for the string “site:wordlog.com *** -spght” in google. That gives you all the pages on your wordpress blog listed as supplemental results. The search result that google returns will have a “Supplemental Result” in the text that follows the url and the short excerpt, and as you can see, all the results for the string I refer to above have that after the results. The spghy can be changed to some other random characters - it doesn’t matter.
Finding all results that are not supplemental results
The following query will show all results that are not supplemental results:
“site:wordlog.com -allinurl:wordlog.com“.
So, for wordlog.com, there are 227 non-supplemental results and 196 supplemental results. However, a search for “site:wordlog.com” returns 325 results, and 196+227 = 423. So I think some of the results returned for “site:wordlog.com” are supplemental results. At the time this article was written, page 25 of the results has two supplemental results right at the top.
What are Supplemental Results?
A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index.
and, additionally, Google maintains that
…the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.
So we know that there is no way to formally request supplemental index pages to be moved to the main results pages. However, one thing bothers me, sort of.
Most of the non-supplemental results for wordlog.com are the archive and category pages. I believe the individual posts should be there in stead. I have noticed, many times, that when I search for a term, I am most often led to the category or date-based archives of a blog, and then I have to manually search for the term again in Firefox, and then, since many themes display only excerpts in these pages, i have to click the article to read it to get the information I need. This is annoying, to say the least.
Fixing the supplemental results problems
There is a duplicate content cure plugin for wordpress that promises to reduce the duplicate content indexed by google by way of your archive and category pages. It does so by adding directives to google to not index archive and category pages by means of meta tags in the page headers. One would think this would cure the supplemental results problem too, and make all your blog posts preferred over the archive pages.
As a small experiment to test this theory that the duplicate content cure plugin will help alleviate the supplemental index problem, I did searches for supplemental and non-supplemental results for seologs.com, the site that published the plugin. Amazingly, seologs has 385 supplemental results and 243 non-supplemental results! So now it appears that the plugin is not the silver bullet for the problem. However, as promised by the plugin, the archive pages are missing from the pages indexed by google. Is this a good thing, though? If the number of indexed, non-supplemental pages are the metric, then it is not. Without the plugin, all of wordlog’s archives are indexed and probably will be returned as search results for some terms. The duplicate content cure plugin prevents some pages from being indexed, totally - it would be nice if it did not do that, really. It is better to have visitors find useful content via your archives if not via a direct link to the relevant article.
Ideally, I would love for the archives pages to be indexed too, with the blog posts being indexed in the main index. Heck, I would love to have all the pages in the supplemental index to be in the main index instead. There are lots of suggested tricks to avoid the supplemental index. The issue with archive pages in wordpress blogs being indexed more prominently is because all WordPress blogs have relative links to the archives pages that look like the following if you look into the source of the page:
"<link rel='archives' title='May 2007' href='http://wordlog.com/archives/2007/05/' />"
In addition to this, you also have links to the archives from the sidebar, which is probably displayed on all pages of your site. The indexing robots should think these pages are really important, since you seem to link to them from every page on your site.
So, a simple way to fix the problem, or at least try to get some pages in the main index might be to have a sitemap containing each and every post on every page in your blog. That would make the pages huge! An alternative would be to have an html sitemap and link to it from the the sidebar or footer. You could also link to posts you think are important from the sidebar. The important things to remember are that:
1) It’s better to have a page in the main index than the supplemental index.
2) It’s better to have a page in the supplemental index than to not have the page indexed at all!
I have a couple of ideas floating around in my brain that I will implement to accomplish item #1 above without violating item #2. I will try them out and let you know if the results are worth mentioning. Do you have any ideas that have worked, that can be verified in a straightforward manner? Blame it on what I do for a living, but I have come to trust verifiable results over speculation and hypothesis.
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Hi
to many supplemental results and only a handful of backlinks to your blog - backlinks without linkpower - and your website is “ill”. Like an old man without power and future….
here are some puzzles:
meta description: absolut different for every site from your website
title tag:absolut different your titles are not different because I can see wordlog.com is the first in all your titles..
every site of your website must have to or three lines of different content in the sourcecode!
deeplinks of article not only backlinks of the homepage..
and yes:yesterday somany seos said: 30000sites are wonderful for a good ranking…. today some know: 300sites in the index and no site in the supplemental is the best way to be under top ten..
texto.de have had 250sites in supplemental results — I’ve seen this february 07 –today the domain is fit
regards
Monika
Comment by Monika — 5/14/2007 @ 8:13 am
There is so much junk written about supplemental results.
There are multiple ways to optimize a blog and Matt Cutts recently stated on SEOmoz
I have almost 6000 pages indexed and only 1 page listed as supplemental.
That being said, supplemental results are not being reported correctly and many pages that would be supplemental on my site are not being shown in either the main index or supplemental.
Those same pages bring me search traffic daily.
I have linked through to my SEO tag… a duplicate content page, like all my other tags.
Comment by Andy Beard — 5/14/2007 @ 8:44 am
Whether the statements by Google are true or not, they are certainly partial:
“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index.”
And you have to look for a very long time to find any supplemental result in the SERPs.
“Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.”
Which again is meaningless- it’s the results, not the (Toolbar) PR, that matter. Oh, and I was under the vague impression that PR applied to a page not a site….
Comment by Lisa — 5/14/2007 @ 9:32 am
It would be swell if WordPress had a field for a meta description (and possibly keywords) that would apply to an individual post or page and override the generic blog description tags when the individual post/page is indexed.
I have a few “feature” pages on my site that I run through WP, but I use a custon template for only that page. Those invariably get better search results than general blog posts. And like you, I’ve definitely noticed plenty of search hits landing in category or archive pages instead of on the actual page the person wants.
Comment by David — 5/14/2007 @ 10:54 am
I changed my archives format to
/foo/rather than date-based archives. I 301 redirect all date requests to the site map, where I have a link to every page and post on my site, including the categories.That seems to work very well, as I’m now getting my top referals [sic] from various Google sites (Google Images is almost always in second).
Comment by Jonathan — 5/14/2007 @ 5:25 pm
David look up SEO Title Tag and Tags In The Head - 2 wordpress plugins that can help in that regard.
Comment by Andy Beard — 5/15/2007 @ 2:24 am
Thanks for pointing those out, Andy!
Until reading this post I’d never really put much work or research into SEO for my site — I don’t have a “tech blog” or run ads or sell anything. But I had noticed the pattern in my logs of search hits not going straight to the page most appropriate. Custom pages (with meta description & keywords in the header) fared much better for me.
Comment by David — 5/15/2007 @ 3:16 am
If you really dig into this issue, you would find that archives, categories, site maps, and similar pages are considered “normal” supplemental pages and not penalized as duplications. A lot of people freaked out and took this too far when it first came out without reading the fine print. They spend a LOT of time on this issue, like you, for something they really didn’t have to worry about. It’s easy, if you are fully hosted, to remove all those date archives from the header and rely upon categories and site maps, which some did, but it won’t hurt you.
Normal blog content isn’t penalized. The issue of duplication comes from splogs using duplicate information on one or more of their web pages and duplicate, already published content from others. Those who use more blockquotes than original content might be penalized if the issue of duplication is really taken seriously by Google.
Comment by Lorelle — 5/15/2007 @ 10:36 am
Lorelle, the thing is - my archives are not “supplemental” and my posts are in the supplemental index! So the point is that things seem to be strangely inverted.
I agree that it would be natural to have the posts in the main index and the archives, both date- and category-based in the supplemental index.
Comment by Carthik — 5/15/2007 @ 12:40 pm
As I said, reports for supplemental results are currently incorrect.
Your categories and date based archive of course are going to appear highly in search results, because you are giving them sitewide links.
Welcome to the nightmare Automattic have just imposed on the Wordpress community by default - Wordpess widgets which don’t provide a way to control which pages the links appear on.
Some themes do contain modified code for the display of this information, but most do not.
Try compensating the linking by adding something like related posts and tagging.
Maybe use the Add link attribute to place nofollow on those navigational links on internal pages.
There are multiple ways to optimise a Wordpress blog for SEO, unfortunately a default Wordpress installation using widgets and most themes isn’t included on the list.
You certainly can get away with it, but you can do much better.
Comment by Andy Beard — 5/18/2007 @ 12:43 am
[…] Supplemental Results and WordPress - Interesting trick to discover which pages in your site are held in Google’s supplemental index. […]
Pingback by Recommended Reading for 9th May through 25th May — 5/25/2007 @ 8:34 pm
Very good information. Thank you and keep up the good work.
Comment by SEO — 6/1/2007 @ 4:21 pm
Hi, just wanted to say you have a very nice blog, am gonna add it in my website in the blogs section, but i think you should replace your background with a better one.. but this is just my opinion
cheeeers.
Comment by Mark87 — 6/6/2007 @ 6:56 pm
Just a question… If a page is a supplemental result, would it be a supplemental result for anyone who want to exchange link with that page?
Comment by roberto — 6/11/2007 @ 6:12 pm
@14
that’s a good question
Comment by jan weidenbach — 8/30/2007 @ 4:50 pm
Great Article! Here is some more about it
http://seomization.blogspot.com/2007/09/supplemental-index.html
Comment by matt — 9/29/2007 @ 7:07 am
Hi your post is amazing.
I like your blog..
ciao
Comment by Be a Good Daughter — 10/25/2007 @ 12:45 am
Hello your post is funny.
I will definitely read your site..
bye
Comment by Be a Good Daughter — 10/26/2007 @ 5:25 am
I use All-in-one SEO pack plugin for WordPress and it’s find for me. At least I entirely disable date archive, no-index for tags. When the site grow a bit bigger I will remove the no-index for tags because then they would have more unique content combination.
WordPress have to learn a lot in SEO and implement it in the core. Currently, all CMS seem to not do a good job at this, even Drupal. Even it’s Blogspot by Google, also have lacked SEO practices.
Generally speaking, if a person have no tech-mind then they loose the game regardless of whatever they use, unless they by SEO services.
After all, only best SEO practices win the competition… but who are the winners? I don’t think it isn’t the original author of the content.
Comment by Binh Nguyen — 11/30/2007 @ 9:11 am
Argh. I wish WordPress give me 120 seconds to revise the comment. There are few typo could you please fix for me:
find fine
by buy
CMS CMSs
have lacked lacks
Comment by Binh Nguyen — 11/30/2007 @ 9:17 am
This is a nice blog site and I have added it to my blogger. Background colour could do with changing to a bit brighter though!!
Comment by job search online — 12/4/2007 @ 12:55 pm
thanks for that piece of information. very helpful.
Comment by Keyword Analyse — 12/20/2007 @ 7:54 am
I don’t even worry about supplemental results any more at least my site is on the search engines. I use to worry about this but I found I was better off spending my time on better things to improve my sites. Supplemental results to me aren’t bad. I think google realizes some scripts duplicate content by accident.
Comment by Your Site — 1/2/2008 @ 9:22 pm
Very good information! Thanks very helpful.
Comment by Domain — 1/28/2008 @ 5:05 am
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Comment by Webhosting — 5/13/2008 @ 8:07 am