Google Supplemental Results and SEO Issues

Webmasters in SEO community are facing Google supplemental result problem for quite a long period of time and trying to find its causes as well as an effective solution to it. However nobody has been able to solve this problem successfully as there is no exact cause leading to even recent, active and clean pages to show up in google supplemental index.

What are Google Supplemental Results?

Google maintains two indexes: the main index is the principal database which stores all the pages coming in normal search, and the supplemental index is the secondary database containing less relevant, obsolete and erroneous pages. The google index algorithm is responsible for sorting search results in the order of importance judged on many factors like search query related and no of quality backlinks. Webpages only coming after the normal results in the search index are called supplemental results. Through supplemental results google provides huge search facility for best SEO results and thereby prevents less important and questionable pages from appearing above the more important pages.

Supplemental Result Causes: -

As per a thorough analysis on web marketing strategy several factors as a collection contribute positively to a webpage coming under supplemental results which may be summarized as follows:

• Presence of duplicate content in META description tags, TITLE elements, main page and navigational text.
• Low page rank pages
• Use of manipulative linking practices like excess of link injections, reciprocal linking and paid links
• A large site with high page count
• Absence of fresh page content

Side Effects of Supplemental Results: -

Webpages coming in supplemental results face the wrath of search engines in many forms. They lose their rank and are considered less reliable. Therefore search engine spiders visit them rarely. As a result supplemental web pages can hardly earn the weight in google index even if it has got maximum no of back links to its credit.

How to Avoid Supplemental Pages?

There are many recommended solutions for a website to help it not coming in google supplemental results, which are as follows:

• Try to fix www/non www domain.com canonical issues first otherwise same content will be delivered at multiple urls.
• Get maximum no of back links for the deeper pages instead of home pages.
• Keep the content of each page unique.
• Start link campaigning for the newly added pages also.
• Include internal links restructuring and trust management.

Improve Your Site’s Organic Prominence in SEO through Natural Google Bombing

Though it is true that there is no shortcut to success but this phrase does not hold good in SEO industry. By following a few black hat search engine optimization techniques one can easily manipulate his site’s ranking in SERP. Google bombing is one such offsite SEO practice which is mainly done to bring a website to the top position of search engines for a particular search term through getting back links from forums, blogs and sites. When a site is linked to other sites using a common phrase, it will naturally come at the top of the result page in Google during a search for this particular phrase as Google has got that unique feature to show up the anchor text used in linking to other sites in SERPS. Thus presence of keywords in the anchor text of so many inbound links to the target site collectively increase its relevancy and influence its ranking in results returned by the Google search engine.

It is also seen that people get undue advantage of the Google bomb concept and try to cause harm to someone’s site by getting it ranked high for an irrelevant search term. Googlebombs are very rare in common queries as there is no dearth of any relevant results for these terms. The most famous Google bomb was for the phrase “miserable failure” which brought President George W. Bush's bio on whitehouse.gov to the top of organic listings in SERPS for that term.

Google gives importance on the quality, quantity as well as keywords present in the anchor text of a site’s inbound links while showing up them in order of their organic prominence in search result pages. If not done properly then google bombers face the risk of their site being noticed by search engine and getting banned as an offending site which hampers the site’s search ranking.

Dos and Don’ts for Natural Google Bombing:-

• While doing SEO link campaigning, one must avoid using a common anchor text as Google often counts them as artificially created links.
• Choose from a list of different anchor texts relevant to your site keywords in your link building.
• Maintain the link campaigning in such a way which looks more natural.
• If possible use some recognized keyword tools like Google adwords and try to collect as many anchor texts as you can related to your keywords from which you can choose the best one.

However Google’s algorithmic update has started giving negative rankings to sites which are traced to have used google bombing by comparatively better analysis of the link structure of the website. Thus the effect of many Google bombs has minimized to some extent. Again this new algorithm has its own limitation too due to which it can’t trace every Google bomb coming in its way.

Google Canonical Issues and Its Solutions in Seo

What is Google Canonicalization?

The word “canonical” basically refers to authoritative or standard. The particular url which you target for web marketing purpose and want your visitors to visit is generally a canonical url. When a website is designed and all of its tracking urls is arranged for internet marketing campaign, more than one url may seem right for a particular webpage. The process of the choosing the best url among the available options specifically for the home pages is known as canonicalization in Google. There are certain urls which seem to be same but are technically different. For example

• domain.com/
• www.domain.com
• domain.com/home.asp
• www.domain.com/index.html

In each of these cases the web server may return completely different web content. Therefore one should try to select the url that represents a particular webpage best from an available list for google url canonicalization.

Google Canonical Issues: -

Google canonical issues may cost search engine optimization professionals a huge cost in terms of domain url. It becomes manifold if the domain url is not set up properly. Google does not recognize both the www domain url (www.domain.com) and the non www domain url (domain.com) as the same website and considers them as completely different websites with individual pages which is not the case. When these pages get indexed by google, you may get supplemental result for duplicate content and at last your own link popularity may get severely affected with all these issues.

Solution to Canonical Problems: -

By setting up a permanent 301 redirect within your .htaccess file, you can protect your site from canonical issues as it requires FTP access only and redirects all forms of your domain url to one standard url called a canonical url. The .htaccess file is a text file which is there in your site to store directory and even site specific server information. A permanent 301 redirect within .htaccess file not only informs a search engine browser that the website it is accessing has moved permanently but also redirects that page to the new url.

Small amount of code lines within your .htaccess file located at root can fix the www/non www canonical issues. The only thing you have to do is to include the following code lines in your .htaccess file.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]