Understanding Supplemental Results — Give Your Content a Purpose!

After many discussions in our member forums and after last week's Marketing Tip there seemed to be some strong interest in learning a bit more about supplemental results, so we thought it would be a good idea to start a new discussion dedicated strictly to the topic.

First, let's refresh your memory with an excerpt from our interview with search expert, Greg Boser:

AA: What is your advice on dealing with these types of [peer-to-peer network] links for agents, especially agents who are enjoying high rankings in Google currently?

GB: These state pages with cross-linking to other Realtors around the country that many real estate websites continue to keep are pretty much worthless now. In my research I have checked many of these types of sites and found that in most cases the link pages are not indexed in Google, or have gone supplemental.

With that in mind, my recommendation would be to delete all your state pages or other pages that host any cross-linking with other real estate agents. Start, or continue focusing your efforts on quality community links that will make your website a trusted domain.

AA: Can you explain in more detail about pages that are currently not indexed or in the supplemental index and how that is affected by inbound or outbound links.

GB: Google's PageRank system currently drives how the Googlebot crawls websites. Google's internal PageRank for each web page is an important factor for whether the pages are in the main, or supplemental index. As PageRank is strictly determined by links, this drives the point home that high quality and trusted links are the way to keep Google happy with your website.

While Google PageRank is only updated on the viewable toolbar once every few months, Google internally updates PageRank scores on websites all the time. Most real estate websites do not have a high enough PageRank to support hundreds of pages being crawled and indexed. Especially real estate sites that have low quality links pointing to their homepage instead of high quality links and a natural linking process throughout the entire site. Deleting unnecessary or low quality pages, such as state link pages, will help focus PageRank and Google crawling on the pages that really matter.

We are again joined by Greg this week as he shares more information about supplemental results, and how to best manage your content for the most effectiveness in your search engine optimization efforts.

And now we turn it over to Greg Boser:

Towards the end of last summer, Google made some significant changes to how they determine what should be included in the Supplemental Index. Matt Cutts briefly mentioned the changes in a post last October.

If you have the stomach to read through all the comments, you'll notice that most people are complaining about seeing a big increase in pages included in the Supplemental Index.

One specific commenter said the following:

"...Yet the vast majority of supp pages in these sites are simply not dupe content , they are unique but very very similar - for eg USGS topo map 1234 *is* very different to map 1235 - yet given a template based site the differences may be small.

Of course the right answer is to make every page "more different". But this is a real challenge for such similar products. Is there not a better way of handling this?"

Here is Matt's Reply:

"PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results, so I'd concentrate on good backlinks more than worrying about varying page layouts, etc."

On the surface, that doesn't sound like an earth shattering statement, but it actually is. Before Google made the recent changes, PR played almost no role in determining what goes into the Supplemental Index. You could start a new site with a ton of new, original content that had very little PR and have all the content included in the main index.

But now, PR is "the primary factor." That means that the amount of content Google will consider for inclusion from any given site is determined in large part by the amount of available PR that's flowing through the site. If you don't have enough juice to sustain the number of pages on your site, there's a very good chance that the majority of your pages (including pages that are truly unique) will end up in the Supplemental Index.

If your content does end up in the Supplemental Index due only to a lack of PR, you aren't permanently lost. If, over time your PR increases, the number of pages that will be included in the main index will increase as well.

Where you get into real trouble is when you have a low level of PR, combined with any of the more traditional Supplemental Index signals (duplicate text, URL patterns, etc.) When that happens, it's like the kiss of death.

Here's a good example involving an Advanced Access site.

In a forum thread, one client wrote:

"Okay, a couple of months ago out of 165 pages on my site, 140 went supplemental. All my state pages will be deleted. But a lot of the remaining are neighborhood pages that I have been working on unique content, photos and custom IDX searches by neighborhood and price range."

His home page has a PageRank of 3, and 165 total pages of content. Out of those 165 pages I'd say somewhere in the neighborhood of 50% are pages that Google would consider duplicate or near duplicate. (These would include all 50 of the state pages, plus all the neighborhood pages that are empty shells with no content).

When you get to a point where a percentage of your content is flagged as untrustworthy, and your PR is low, the domain as a whole tends to be treated as untrustworthy, which then causes your unique pages to get tossed into the Supplemental Index as well.

That is the true negative impact of the state pages. Forget about all the things I've said about potential spam penalties. Even if Google never directly punishes an Advanced Access site for having them, you still end up paying a price for them because their mere existence causes a portion of your "good" content to get tossed in the trash.

So How Do You Fix It?

I'd start by paying attention to the number of pages Google has included in the main index. Think of it as a message from them telling you what they think is a reasonable number of pages for a site with your age and PR.

In the case of our client in the forums, that number is somewhere around 20-30 pages. He needs to focus his efforts on building the highest quality 30 page site he possibly can. That means not only taking down all the state pages, it also means removing any city or neighborhood pages that contain no content. (Publishing empty "shell" pages is absolutely the worst thing you can ever do).

Getting the site stripped down to the best 30 pages, will also help in terms of PR distribution. Right now, that PR 3 home page has about 100 links on it. You just can't expect to get good results when you chop something so small into 100 pieces.

Once the site is trimmed down to a size that makes sense, I'd get back to work on finding some quality links. I'd also stop thinking about having a page that matched every possible neighborhood in my city. Instead, I'd prioritize the neighborhoods based on their potential profitability and then begin to reintroduce content that is truly unique and complete. The rate at which I'd add new content would be directly proportionate to the rate I gained new links.

If you follow that type of strategy, you'll end up with a strong site that gets all of its content in the main database.

- Greg Boser aka WebGuerrilla

We are grateful for Greg's advice for our family of clients.  Now let the questions begin... login to our member forums to join our continued discussion on this topic!

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