Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There And How to Escape
By way of some background, Google has two indexes, the main index and a supplemental index. The supplemental index has been given the name Google Hell amongst others. There are some good reasons why you don’t want pages of your website or blog to be in the supplemental index.
- Pages from the main index show up first so if you are stuck in supplemental your pages will be way down in the rankings for anything competitive
- Google doesn’t crawl the supplemental index as often so once there it can take a long time to get back
To ascertain whether your pages are in Google Hell use the search query site:www.yourwebsite.com.au
The supplemental pages will have supplemental result after the url.
Top 5 Reasons
- Duplicate or Similar Content
Pages with very similar or duplicated content are likely to end up in the supplemental index. Blogs can have a problem if posts are short and therefore pages are similar to each other with elements such as navigation, blogrolls etc repeated on each page. Longer posts with unique content will fix this as will comments.
- Similar Page Titles
Give each page a unique page title. With blogs beware of generated page titles that are all very similar because the blog name is prefixed to the title. This is more of a problem with long blog names. Don’t leave these titles as they are or Google will determine that all your pages are about the same thing and will regard them as duplicates. There are plugins for wordpress blogs that allow you to customise the page title. Seo Title Tag is one.
- Similar or Duplicated Page Descriptions
The same applies to the description metatag. Make sure that you enter a unique description for every page. The Seo Title Tag plugin has this feature for wordpress blogs.
- Poor Quality External Linking
One of the the top reasons for a page being in the supplemental index is a lack of relevant links from quality sites. Write good quality content that is worth linking to and get trusted links. Don’t take part in link exchange programmes.
- Poor Internal Linking Structure
It can be hard at first to get good quality external links but you do have control over links to pages from other pages on your website or blog. If a page ends up in the supplemental index a few internal links pointing to it, in addition to fixing any duplicate problems outlined above, can get it out.
(This post is part of the problogger group writing project. I’d like to welcome any first time visitors who clicked through from problogger).
May 8th, 2007 at 10:18 pm
[...] Christine Parfitt of SemFire makes suggestions on how to get yourself out of Google’s supplementary results. [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 2:00 am
Hi Christine,
Found your site through Francis Lee.
I agree with all your points I just don’t feel the ordering of “4. Poor Quality External Linking” reflects the real world. I’d be leaning to switch #2 and #4 as surely the algorithm gives higher precedence to the content of a document than the title.
It’s good to know there’s an SEM agent in Queensland (Brisbane), looks like a slippery market at the moment. I’m working in Milton (CBD), do you subscribe to any Meetup’s here in Vegas?
May 9th, 2007 at 2:13 am
Hi Michael,
Thanks for the comment. In all honesty I don’t know what the correct order should be. Funnily enough my original order was closer to your suggestion and then I switched it around.
Matt Cutts has stated that low page rank is the main reason for a page being in the supplemental index so that’s the linking part of the equation. I’ve studied several websites with pages in supplemental and they all had duplicate titles and/or descriptions. It’s probably a combination of all the above.
Subscribe to meetups? No, I guess. What meetups do you mean?
May 9th, 2007 at 2:19 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 3:39 am
Check out the Meetup’s on meetup.com, there’s plenty going on in Brisbane at the moment.
May 9th, 2007 at 4:29 am
Hi Christine,
as they say great minds think alike !
Seriously the supplemental issue in creating a lot of worries amongst webmasters - the bottom line is that quality is making its way into the algos …
May 9th, 2007 at 5:18 am
Hi Sante
I enjoyed looking through your blog even though I don’t understand Italian :))
May 9th, 2007 at 6:16 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 7:09 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 7:32 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 10:51 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 10:56 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 11:17 am
Good info. Thanks for that post. We bloggning rookies need those tidbits to get us up to par.
May 9th, 2007 at 1:02 pm
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 9th, 2007 at 8:40 pm
Hmmm… good tips here. I’m learning all these good tips in my effort to be a better blogger.
Thanks!
May 10th, 2007 at 1:25 pm
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 10th, 2007 at 9:04 pm
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 11th, 2007 at 8:56 am
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]
May 11th, 2007 at 2:08 pm
[...] Google Hell: Top 5 Reasons You Are There … And How to Escape by Christine Parfitt [...]