Those of us who are directory owners may have experienced the affect of google's supplemental results filter one time or another. And there are some who do not know what supplemental results are. So first I will provide an explantation of what these results are, then I will give a few tips on how to keep your pages from appearing supplemantal as well as how to get your pages out of the supplemental results, which sometimes can be a pain in the butt to do.
Ok, so what are supplemental results anyway? According to google "A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. If you're a webmaster, please note 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". See What's a supplemental result at googl's webmaster help center.
Staying out of Supplemental Results.
So how do you keep your pages from appearing in the supplemental results? The best thing to do is make sure that you have a well structured directry put togther, for staters make sure that you take the time to name your pages correctly. Fort the most part you will want to make sure the category name is the title tag. It is also better if you give each page and category a unique description, the best way to do this would be to use the name of the category in the description, for example: If your category is named "Directory of Directories" then you might want to write a description that says something like "Have a look at some the directories listed under our directory of directories category". Nothing hard, you just want to make sure that you get the category name in there somewhere. Do not just use the category name as your description, one it does not look very good, and two there is no need to repeat the exact same thing that is in the title tag.
Although not recommended by some, if you wish to use the keywords meta tag then I recommend that you come up with at least 3 keywords for each category. I'm sure you will be fine if you do not use they keyword tag, but I think it is good practise to do things all the way instead of leaving some out. It will not take you long to set up your directory pages up this fashion.
Another thing that you will want to take advantage of is the alt tag function. Alot of directories have logo's on their pages with a link pointing back to the home page, but most of these logo's do not display any kind of information, so what you want to do is name these logo's, for example: If your category page is named "Web Directory" then you may want your alt tag to say something like "Web Directory Category", again something very simple and to the point.
H1 headers are also a good choice to use. Again, you would place the name of your directory category in a h1 header, this is also good to do for ranking purposes as well.
Getting out of Supplemental Results.
If your directory is already stuck in the supplemental results there are few things that you can do to get them out. The first thing you will want to do is remove all duplicate pages that you have from your server. The next thing is to set up a 404 error page through your .htaccess file (for more inforamtion on how to set a 404 error page visit How to Set Up a Custom 404 File Not Found Page on your Website (thesitewizard.com), what this will do is the tell the search engines that those pages no longer exist and therefore they will remove those pages from their index. You could also use a permanent 301 direct and point those pages to your homepage.
As long as you follow the steps above and apply the information provided under "Staying out of Supplemental Results" then get your site of these results will not be a problem for you. Just remember that it can take time before google removes all of these pages from their supplemental index, in the mean time keep getting links to point to your directory.
0 comments: