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Supplemental Index

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Recently I learned about Google’s Supplemental Index. It’s web pages that are excluded from Google’s search engine. The main reason a web page seems to land in the index is because it is duplicate content. Using the SEO Tool for Firefox, I found out how many of my pages were in the supplemental index. For one of my websites that is a blog using WordPress, I had 2400 pages indexed and 2300 in the supplemental index.

I checked a couple of results pages to see which pages were in the supplemental index. Most seemed to be either comments or RSS content. Apparently WordPress creates a bunch of duplicate content by its structure. Having a post in two categories can possibly create duplicate content. To fix this problem, I added a robots.txt file to my root directory. My first robots.txt was apparently too restrictive and blocked a lot of pages from Google. My Google traffic was nonexistent for about two weeks. It needs some tweaking before I add it back again.

The supplemental index pages do not count against you when it comes to PageRank. The pages listed in the supplemental index will not be found in Google searches. Most of the pages for my website in the supplemental index don’t have much value anyway since most are comments or feed results. It would just be nice to get that large supplemental number to a much smaller one.

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