Supplemental Results with Page Rank

[scot184]

So this is interesting...

I was going through my analytics and noticed a fairly massive traffic drop. I hadn't changed anything, so I investigated a few different areas before doing a Google in site search.

Like so: site: The Truth About Credit Cards.com | Credit card debt help, credit tips, student debt help, credit advice and credit repair.

And I noticed that after about the first two pages of results, it was all supplemental. Why? Not sure.

These latter pages weren't any different...they were actually older, with PR up to PR5, yet somehow supplemental. I have no idea why, though I assume there may be canonical issues?

I was thinking about blocking the robots from accessing my category and archive pages. But I still don't understand why some pages are supplemental and some aren't. It's just odd that old pages with solid PR are supps, but new pages and posts aren't. Perhaps it has something to do with older pages being indexed on archive/category pages?

I'm baffled...if anyone could share some insight that'd be awesome.

Thanks!

[crankydave]

All of your meta descriptions are the same. This can cause the pages to be placed in the SI.

Dave

[ctabuk]

Run it by SiteReportCard: Web Site Optimization and Promotion Tools you have some html problems. The download time as well needs looking at.

xenu also spotted a lot of these
If you are the webmaster, your account may have exceeded for one or more of the following reasons:

• <LI class=style2>Your site has used more than 20% of the cpu. <LI class=style2>Your account has too many processes running at the same time.
• Your site was consuming too many resources. This happens on occassion to very busy sites that have inefficient scripts running.

280 URL's all with the same tags - yeah Crankydave is spot on.

[incrediblehelp]

All of your meta descriptions are the same. This can cause the pages to be placed in the SI.

Dave

Correct!

[scot184]

I agree that it "can" cause the results to go supplemental, but won't always be the case.

I have a very similar mortgage site with the same setup and nearly every page is indexed.

So I'm thinking it could be canonical. I've started a robots.txt file to sort it out. Question regarding that if anyone would be so kind...

Can I use a wildcard like so: Disallow: /*=*

I want to disallow urls on my site that contain "=". I know you can do it for question marks (?), but want to be sure it works for "=" as well.

Thanks!

[crankydave]

If the issues are canonical, you'll generally see 1 url in the RI and the other in the SI. As far as the "disallow" you'd be better off, IMO, redirecting the extraneous URL's to your preferred one.

An easy way to check if the descriptions might be causing some problems is to change a few of them on pages that are in the SI, making them unique and targetting the specific page and see what happens.

While duplicate descriptions may not automatically land a page in the SI it's always a risk. If you're referring to the mortgage site in your signature, it may be starting to catch up with you...

site:www.thetruthaboutmortgage.com *** -view - Google Search

Dave

[scot184]

Well that's about 20 pages out or nearly 300 in the supps...and they include the TOS page, some minor posts, and some category pages...so I wouldn't say it's a problem. I mean even Matt Cutt's blog has 50-100 pages in the supps. So it's somewhat unavoidable unless you want to spend a lot of time on it.

I'm just curious why the credit site is so much worse off than the mortgage site. But I'm using the robots txt to see what comes of it. And I will try changing a few descriptions to see what happens there as well. Thanks for that suggestion.

[crankydave]

I didn't look at the links pointing to the 2 sites. Many sites with perfectly useful and unique pages find that a lot of them end up in the SI based upon their link profile.

Another suggestion to consider would be to point a couple of solid external links to one of your pages in the SI. If it pops out, that would be an indication that strengthening the sites link profile would help.

Dave