Will Supplemental Index ever be fixed?

[jackson992]

All of my sites are in it one way or another. Some sites only have the home page out of it. The rest is all supplemental results. Obviously something is wrong on Google's end.

[greeneagle]

jackson992:

Just on the surface:

1) No DTDs (Document Type Declarations)

2) deprecated font callouts

3) large pages with low content to code ratios, ie... index 43k+ with 20% content

4) no independent CSS files

5)Take Katts - From "adult costumes" to "babies", from Pilgrims to Sears???? Where and what should an SE do there? Where is the logic chain there? How do they determine what the site is about?

6)Take "Jack's and Katts", reciprocally linked? How many are linked into each other? How many are there? How are they linked up?

With similar heavily coded pages (vs content) - The balance goes to "similar" and thusly indexed as so, as supplemental, most likely. IMO - Try reducing your code to content ratio even more, if possible, first.

Putting DTDs in place sure wouldn't hurt either.

What makes you think that it is just a GOOGLE issue, or a GOOGLE supplemental index problem at all?

IMO - At this point in the supplemental game... I thought we for the most part, would agree that secondary measures were necessary in most cases, to bail out.

A while back the GOOG pretty well said we have done what we are going to do, pronouncing the "supplemental indexing issues" as fixed and working as intended in their eyes.

This has been an issue for many shopping sites and others relying heavily on auto-generated content.

Similarity has been at the heart of the problem in many cases, "autogenerated" or not.

If any way possible include more content vs code and more distinction between pages and their content.

Ken

[jackson992]

Hi Ken:

Very interesting observations. First off could you add more to the content versus code discussion. Primarily I obviously do sales pages so content is going to be minimal if you mean uniqye informative content. On Katts you will note however that we did add description content for each store as we are also doing on the category pages.

1. I'm not familiar with doc type declarations at all. Can you tell me what these are used for and how they affect rankings?

2. deprecated font callouts - I've never heard this phrase before. Could you please explain further?

3. Is there something to measure this? Also what can be done about it.

4. My CSS is in my top include file. Is this a bad thing?

5. Index pages are so hard to come up with something on a mall site as there are so many topics covered. I hope the inner pages and category pages are more focused.

6.Yes I link similar sites. My main site is Jacks and that lists all my sites.

What really strikes me is sometimes these pages come about for a bit then go back into supp and some other ones come out of supp. But it seems completely random and not a lot (maybe 2 result pages) are out of the supp index.

Katts was doing very well in Yahoo until the last update late August and has gone down a tad since then but is still getting 76% of it's seach traffic from Yahoo.

Jack's sadly gets mostly from Google but 3/4ths of it is from the supp pages. It also gets a little from MSN but MSN doesn't seem to index nearly the amount of pages Google does.