Google Supplemental Results Index is NOT a place you want to be! The way you end up in there is if your pages are so badly described or categorised, Google could scarcely decide if there was a difference between them. Bottom line is, if you don’t take the time and effort to make your pages unique, with page URLs, Titles and Descriptions that accurately describe the contents of the page, why on earth should Google even bother indexing them at all? That they do so is a credit to them, even though they no option but to park them in the “Other Crap We Found” bin…
Everyone who bothers to read the Search Engine Guidelines would know that Search Engines loathe duplicate content with a passion bordering on paranoia… Three of the key “uniqueness” indicators on a web page are its URL, Title and Description. If all pages have unfriendly URLs containing “&, = or ?” and not a keyword in sight, that is a very bad start. Compound that with generic Titles and Description meta-tags, and you’ve gone a long way towards obfuscating the reason that the page exists.
Do a Google search for “site:www.mysite.com” (replace “mysite” with YOUR site’s domain name) for obvious reasons… This will show you what they have found and indexed on your site… You will see the individual page URLs, the Titles and Descriptions… All different, are they? If not, you have a problem! Not only must they be different, they must be accurate!
Bear in mind that in the event that one of those pages actually finds itself thrust into prominence in a Search Engine Results Page, it needs to capture the interest and attention of the viewer… and if they click through to your site, its important that they find what they were looking for! If not, they left already! That is twice as bad as you might think, because Google actually takes note of how long they stayed… and factors this into your sites relevancy for whatever term your page was found for. If people are going to you and staying for a while, the “stickiness” of your site can increase your rankings for that search term! Conversely… if they are leaving immediately, your page will decrease in value as a consequence.
As a general rule, your goal should be to make sure that every page on your site is unique / different. It should focus on 1 - 3 specific keyword phrases that will draw people in via search engine results pages, and it should provide information, entertainment or something of value related to that term or terms. If it does not do that, there seems little point having the page on the site in the first place!
Optimisation of a site is all about accurately describing the contents so that its obvious to both automated Search Engine spiders AND human viewers. That brings the “qualified traffic” flow of visitors who know what they want, and that your site probably has it!
Yet Another SEO Article by;
Ben Kemp, aka The SEO Guy
Web: www.comauth.co.nz
Email: SEO@TheSeoGuy.co.nz
Contact us for a Free SEO Site Review….
duplicate content penalty Google search engine optimisation SEO Articles supplemental results index
Latent semantic indexing (LSI) is a concept whereby your site is also assessed on content other than the keywords that you are obviously targeting in the on-page and off-page elements of the site. Partly, this is to combat using keywords to draw traffic to content unrelated to the keywords - as porn, gambling and pharmacy spam sites are inclined to do.
More importantly, its because there is a very high mathematical probability that a site that is genuinely about a specific topic ALSO includes multiple iterations of related words, phrases and terms e.g.;
Therefore, the major search engine algorithms’ are now applying the concepts of “latent semantic indexing” and taking into account all word relationships within the site. Whilst an algorithm might lack “intelligence,” the mathematical model is quite robust and delivers extremely accurate relevancy assessments. To apply the concept of LSI to your site, its a matter of NOT over-loading your page with primary keywords (spamming) but instead, using variations to more accurately describe your topic or theme; E.g. using the term “SEARCH” the following options appear;
Variations or derived words; searcher, searched, searching,
Synonyms - query, queried, querying, seeking, looking, finding
Hypernym: activity, examination, examine, higher cognitive process, investigate, investigating, investigation, look into, operation, scrutiny, see.
> Synonym: explore, hunt, hunting, look, look for, lookup, research, seek.
> Hyponym: angle, beat about, browse, cast about, cast around, comb, cruise, divine, drag, dredge, exploration, feel, finger, fish, forage, foraging, frisk, frisking, fumble, gather, go, go after, grope, grub, hunt, leave no stone unturned, looking, looking for, manhunt, nose, poke, prospect, pry, pursuance, pursue, pursuit, quest, quest after, quest for, raid, ransack, ransacking, re-explore, rifle, rummage, scan, scour, scouring, seek out, seeking, shakedown, shop, strip-search, surf, want.
> Derived: searcher
Noun
> Hypernym: activity, examination, higher cognitive process, investigating, investigation, operation, scrutiny.
> Synonym: hunt, hunting, lookup.
> Hyponym: exploration, forage, foraging, frisk, frisking, hunt, looking, looking for, manhunt, pursuance, pursuit, quest, ransacking, rummage, scouring, seeking, shakedown.Verb
> Derived: searcher.
> Synonym: explore, look, look for, research, seek.
> Hypernym: examine, investigate, look into, see.
> Hyponym: angle, beat about, browse, cast about, cast around, comb, cruise, divine, drag, dredge, feel, finger, fish, frisk, fumble, gather, go, go after, grope, grub, hunt, leave no stone unturned, nose, poke, prospect, pry, pursue, quest after, quest for, raid, ransack, re-explore, rifle, rummage, scan, scour, seek out, shop, strip-search, surf, want.The purpose of the example is to show that there are many ways to describe the same activity, product or service.
How to Apply Latent Semantic Indexing
Implement LSI on your site by thoughtfully including variations, derivations, synonyms, hyponyms and hypernyms of your primary keywords and phrases. You will more effectively convince the Search Engines of your content theme than you would by stuffing multiple iterations of the same primary keywords into those page/s!
Yet Another SEO Article by;
Ben Kemp, aka The SEO Guy (nz)
Web: www.comauth.co.nz
Email: SEO@TheSeoGuy.co.nz
Contact us for a Free SEO Site Review….
Articles Google latent semantic indexing seo sem SEO SEO Articles Web Design Issues
If you wonder why your site does not appear in a search on Google, you can quickly check if its actually being indexed… try the following search;
“site:www.yoursite.co.nz” and of course, replace “yoursite” with the URL or YOUR site!
This should produce a list of all the pages in your site that Google has found, and decided were worthy of indexing. If no pages were found then you need to call The SEO Guy! 
Google offers several similar little tools, and each of these provides useful information about your site, and an insight into the way Google “sees” it. In a Google search box, just type the operator and your domain name (less the http://www/ portion as per the previous example.)
| Operator |
Description |
Search Format |
| site: |
Indexed pages in your site |
site:www.yoursite.com |
| allinurl: |
Pages that refer to your site’s URL |
allinurl:www.yoursite.com |
| link: |
Pages that link to your site |
link:www.yoursite.com |
| cache: |
The current cache of your site |
cache:www.yoursite.com |
| info: |
Information we have about your site |
info:www.yoursite.com |
| related: |
Pages that are similar to your site |
related:www.yoursite.com |
Google Sitemaps
Signing up for a Google SiteMaps account is also a good move as a great deal of extra information about your site - as Googles sees it - is available. This includes Crawl and Index errors, and also a range of Crawl & Index statistics. It is possible to gain an insight into what keywords Google associates with your site - both from the site itself, and from the sites that link to it! The errors (if any) are very important, as they may reveal sound reasons for google not indexing your site fully.
Whilst submitting a sitemap is in itself no guarantee of inclusion, or of rankings, it can help get all pages indexed and at the same time ensure that appropriate emphasis is placed on the most important pages. E.g. that the Product/Services pages are treated as more important than the About Us, Privacy Statement etc pages.
If your site does not show up in the site:yoursite.com search, you certainly have a problem that you need to get to the bottom of! There can be avariety of reasons for exclusion from Search Engine idexes, including;
- Insufficient incoming links - some Search Engines think that if no one links to you, then you are not indexing…
- You have duplicate content - multiple domain names pointing to the same pages
- Other transgressions such as hidden text, excessive use of doorway pages, cloaking etc
If you cannot figure it out, feel free to contact us for assistance because we get to deal with these kinds of issues every day!
If you own a web site AND you have multiple domain names registered, you might want to read this with your full attention. There are a great many web sites out there which, by inappropriate use of multiple domain names, effectively cripple their search engine rankings by blatantly breaching search engine guidelines! Site owners often register more than one domain, and there are sound reasons for doing this, including;
- The main URL includes a keyword phrase but is too long to type quickly, so a shorter, cryptic one is utilised and maybe is also used on business cards and letter heads.
- You take various versions of domains to prevent competitors from grabbing them - dot.com, dot.co.nz, dot.biz, dot.info etc, and point them all to the “main” site.
- You take various country versions - dot.co.nz, dot.com.au, dot.co.uk because you are going to expand into those markets - but in the interim you point them all to the “main” site.
There are also misguided reasons for doing this, including;
- Having multiple domains pointing to the same location in the hope that the search engines will be duped into indexing ALL of them as different content, giving you lots of top rankings under different domains.
Search engines hate duplicated content with a passion… but their automated spiders and bots cannot determine which category YOU fall into - uninformed and innocent of intent, or deliberately and knowingly manipulative. So all sites who transgress can expect to be treated equally. And yes, you can be banned from the SE indexes for getting it wrong!
The search engines do not give out many guidelines - in fact they are all very coy about giving too information much away. However, when they do make a statement by way of guidelines, regardless of how politely it is worded, you had best sit up and take notice because they are really, really serious about it!
Google Guidelines on Multiple Domains
In the case of Google, their Webmaster Guidelines are unambiguous! E.g. on this page; http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769 Google are quite clear on this;
Quality Guidelines - Specific Guidelines
- Don’t employ cloaking or sneaky redirects.
- Don’t create multiple pages, subdomains, or domains with substantially duplicate content
What This Means to You
There is a clear and present danger in having multiple sites pointing to the same location if they load exactly the SAME content - this is a SERIOUS breach of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and is expressly FORBIDDEN because the search engines can only interpret this as a blatant attempt to generate duplicate content under different URL’s. Regardless of your actual intentions in this, its likely to result in a BAN from search engine indexes. Not a good start to an online presence, right?
Ignorance of The Law is No Excuse
Ignorance of search engine guidelines is not a valid excuse either! Unfortunately, many web designers and hosting companies are blissfully unaware of the correct way to implement multiple domain names. The result is that many web site owners unknowingly jeopardise their site’s inclusion in the search engine rankings.
My advice is that if you have more than one domain name, you check how its been set up. If your have two domains; http://www.2nddomain.com and http://www.2nddomain.com and BOTH load the same pages but with the different domains showing, then you have a problem. If you can also load the sites as http://www.2nddomain.com and http://www.2nddomain.com then totals 4 different ways of indexing the SAME content!
The Right Way to Do It
That said, it IS permitted to have multiple domains pointing to the same content BUT it may only be done via the use of a Permanent 301 Redirect being applied to the secondary domains, e.g. typing in the URL for any of the secondary domains will redirect you to the main site. This change can easily be implemented, at no cost other than a few of minutes of time.
In this example, http://www.2nddomain.com is redirected to http://www.2nddomain.com and and neither visitors nor SE spiders ever “see” content under the secondary domain name. The same logic should also be applied to the non-www versions of both domain names to complete the process and to prevent potential conflicts with the search engines.
Articles Google multiple domain names search engine penalties Web Design Issues
