I thought it would be worthing starting a thread on the supplemental issue, with a multi-lingual twist. Day after day I am seeing more and more pages going supplemental and, although some say that it's not really an issue my understanding is quite the contrary and having devastating consequences on good content.

Have you have experienced supplemental problems on areas of your website in different languages ?

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

I've been involved in a couple of campaigns within large enterprise that have encountered supplemental issues as a result of search engines not making the correct distinctions as to the country localization of content.
The most extreme cases were apparent for sites that could not technically leverage ccTLDs or local IP hosting. You effectively get content from various same language countries competing for rankings, i.e: india, canada, usa, australia, singapore...
The concern here isn't really due to the language aspects but rather duplicate content so the answer really boils down to good old content differentiation.
If your pages are in supplemental, its not the end of the day, they can still drive traffic however they are a clear indication that there is something wrong with your website (maybe technical barriers) or the content is simply deemed to be of low quality.

Mr Whipster - tis a pleasure to be true to have you with us - and your friends at Web Certain will be delighted to correspond with you here I'm sure!

Hi Mr Whipster,

IMO there has been a radical shift in defining what pages are.

From what I am seeing the quality of pages depends much more on incoming links.

I have also witnessed new pages going directly supplemental for a number of days (weeks) and then surface and rank well.

What I am yet to see are supplemental results drive traffic. When pages go supplemental the impact on incoming traffic is visible.

I believe this issue is of greater importance and requires a great deal of effort for multilingual sites.

Pages with good incoming links from different locations should help solve the supplemental issues that you mentioned - any experience along these lines out there ??

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

• URL – use one Unique URL per page, Keep it under 2 parameters, avoid session id or any structure with an outcome of visibly duplicate content, preferably use KW e.g.: domain.com/KW
• Title - Every page deserves a unique title starting with its KW.
• Keyword tag - don't use the same tag all across the site, empty is better.
• Description tag - don't use the same tag all across the site, empty is better.
• Content - unique content on each page/URL, preferably at the top of the source.
• Anchor - Use the relevant KW while linking to a page, this could be done using the link's anchor or alt/title attributes.
• Links (In-site links) - Build proper archives, sitemaps and navigation, some supplemental results are pages that had visible strong links and became orphan (this is common with content that used to have a link from the homepage and the webmaster replaced/removed it).
• Links (Incoming ones) - non homepage deep links never hurt.

Hi and good morning/evening to all out there,
All the element that are being mentioned are great advice and we all must be aware of these factors while working - especially for big websites, typically Ecommerce sites where heavy templating with rich menus can often interfere and be predominant w.r.t. actual content.

There have been instances where I have solved this problem by running a very quick website checkup for duplicate content you might find interesting.

But what I am seeing are new pages going directly supplemental whereas before new pages on websites that are ranking well would typically shoot up to the top within a few days.

The pages are coming out of supplemental and ranking as well, but it's the new criteria that G. is using to test the pages that I find curious.

Are pages going supplemental in the first instance and then systematically ?

Why are they going supplemental by definition ? Are they being checked for quality and duplicate content and then released to the main index ?

It would be great to hear from someone with similar experience - so far I seem to be the only one witnessing this

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

I been noticing this also. Recently I added 20 new pages on a very old trusted site that ranks very well. All pages were indexed 2 days from addign to site, 3 days later 10 of the pages fell into supplemetnal. The pages are well linked, unique content, unique title and Meta tags. Where usually any page that I add on the site gets indexed and ranked within two days these pages fell into supplemental.

Waiting it out to see if it returned to normal index.

A fabulous tool I have come across to evaluate the uniqueness of a page vis a vis another, and even better to effectively communicate this in a layman friendly way is through block level shingle analysis or k-level shingle analysis, or w-shingling.

This concept has cropped up at several SES shows over the last two years and is hinted to be used by most search engines in determining duplicate content.

I was out to Milan at SES where I presented my perspective on Supplemental results. There wasn't much talk amongst other SEOs which surprised me a bit to be honest. I was approached by a few participants and they are all witnessing the same behavior with Google. Pages are going in and out of the supplemental index. Even good pages, pages with original content, unique title and description tags bla bla bla ...

The fact that pages are falling into the supplemental index could mean that:

1. 1 Google is modifying the approach to indexing webisites and will first evaluate your pages before making them available to a more general public (I keep on saying that if you are supplemental then nobody is going to see you)
2. 2 There could be a greater attribution (=importance) to external links on a page: before it was the uniqueness of the page that counted, now they could be looking for link juie to keep the page in the main index

Should this be true there will be serious consequences for many

__________________

Sante J. Achille
Search Engines & Web Marketing Consultant
skype: rifardo

My 2 cents :

What you're describing reminds me something : sandbox
Or more exactly, a new kind of sandbox effect.

Last year, I observed something about Sandbox :
On august 2006 I decided to park my pool of domain names. I builded an home made parking system.
To my great surprise these crappy (about 20) websites hited top rankings... for a while.
In fact, they almost all folowed the same pattern :
1. Good start, high positions for a couple of month. Over performance.
2. Drop down in the dephs for 4-6 month
3. Slow up to "regular" rankings

My mind was that Google were using information life cycle in algo :
1. Artificial over exposure
2a. If over exposure create traffic and popularity => immediate good rankings
2b. If not, sandbox effect

Las month, I tried to proove this theory. But I lacked websites in my panel. It also seems that Google complexified (once again) its behavior.

These "systematic" supplemental results could be a new part of sandbox effect, don't you think ?