Google's Supplemental Index
I've read about Google's supplemental Index a while ago but never thought that it would happen to my over-a-year-old, PR6 website:
It used to rank high for many popular keywords but now the mainpage's disappeared from Google's main Index while most of the internal pages have fallen into the supplemental Index.
Supplemental What???
The supplemental Index is usually reserved for pages with little or duplicate content, have a poor trust factor (e.g. more reciprocal than one-way links), lots of orphaned pages, etc. Needless to say, if Google can return a search result from their main Index, websites in the supplemental Index will never show.
You can check if your website is in the supplemental Index by going to Google and typing in site:yourdomainname.com in the search box - the words "Supplemental Result" in green will appear alongside the affected webpages (see picture above).
What Can I Do?
You can try to get your website out of Google's supplemental Index by doing the following:
a) reduce duplicate content between your pages by having unique meta tags, headers, etc.
b) increase non-duplicate content, i.e. unique text on the individual pages.
c) eliminate duplicate content with other websites.
d) eliminate orphaned pages by improving your internal linking, e.g. with a sitemap.
e) increase your trust factor by getting more one-way link from good neighbourhoods.
After you have done all the above, resubmit your site to Google.
Additional Reading:
- Matt Cutts: Gone Supplemental
- Google's Webmaster Help Center: What's A Supplemental Result?
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