Dec 28 2006

I Know I Have All Supplemental Results

By Jeremy Schoemaker 33 comments

For the last 6 months or so almost all pages on www.shoemoney.com have gone supplemental. I swear I think I get 1 email every other day at least letting me know that… So what does that mean? Well evidently Google thinks my pages have little value or something like that. Its ok… I rank #1 for Shoemoney and really that is all I care about.

Its kind of proving me wrong that just building good content and good links is enough… maybe I will have to do some actual SEO!

Its kind of fun to build a site that sucks in search engines and has no hope to get better. You actually can concentrate on what you want to do and not writing some spammy title for search engine traffic.

Here are stats so far this month. You can see the huge spikes when I made digg front page(s), Delicious Front Page/ and stumbleupon traffic. I was most surprised from the stumbleupon traffic.

Ohhh ya also notice the top 5 useragents are all FireFox Weeeeeeeeee!

blue said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:09 pm

Looks like you rank well in Yahoo! Maybe Google just sucks?!!?

[Reply]
ShoeMoney said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:12 pm

Well I can think of several reasons off the top of my head why it sucks maybe I will make a post on that.

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Douglas LaFrennie said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:18 pm

Notice the third result
It’s pointing to
http://www.shoemoney.com/wordpresscomments.txt

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Mr SEO said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:21 pm

Didn’t you recently do a redesign? That could be a reason.

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Jason Poteet said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:40 pm

It sounds like some backlash from the Forbes article, “Bitten By The Google Spider”. When I read the quotes from you I was very surprised you would be so open about basically saying screw Google we are getting around them.

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Dr. Byte said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:43 pm

I don’t know if you did just to see who was on the ball or not but your graphic should reference http://www.shoemoney.com/images/dec-stat.jpg
not
http://www.shoemoney.com/images/dec-stat.gif

[Reply]
Chris Hooley said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:44 pm

I can see why you have lots of supplementals… I htink Aaron Wall pointed out at the Elite Retreat that you have lots of “thin content” that can be easily rectified. For example, your photo galleries (which rock BTW) are really just duplicate page shells with a pic in the middle and a crap page title. If you add a little UGC element to each page, where people can comment on the pics, add stuff, tag the pics (which might be rolled into a page title and metadata changing attribute) you can thicken up and change up all those pages so they are different enough for G to take notice of them.

There’s a handful of other easy changes you could make that would probably have a nice impact as well. Though I see your point, you can rock the web with 0 SEO if you are a good marketer, which you seem to be doing

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ShoeMoney said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:46 pm

yea chris - I have had it disallowed in my robots.txt for a while now… we will see what that does

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ShoeMoney said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:46 pm

hmm both work… also .png works to.

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ShoeMoney said on December 28th, 2006 at 7:49 pm

went supplimental long before the redesign.

I am going to do another redesign soon though.

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john said on December 28th, 2006 at 8:05 pm

the real question is how much are you making a day with all these ads

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ShoeMoney said on December 28th, 2006 at 8:23 pm

http://www.shoemoney.com/?page_id=350

if you are interested

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graywolf said on December 28th, 2006 at 11:34 pm

So are you saying you’ve been supplemental for a while now? Can you give us an idea what month? It would be really interesting just to see a graph for the year without any numbers showing a steep drop at some point.

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Ken said on December 29th, 2006 at 12:06 am

dec-stat.gif does not work in ie6. not sure if you care about us ie mucks.

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clickfire said on December 29th, 2006 at 12:37 am

Happens to me all the time and I panic… until I drill down and realize the good results come later. I am seeing 2640 results with the site operator. The sups start appearing at #740. Assuming all the 740+ results are non supped, then most of your results are fine.

[Reply]
Anthony Shapley said on December 29th, 2006 at 3:31 am

Hi, I had this exact same problem with my blog, I took a couple of steps and waited a few weeks and wham it all came back. Firstly I placed meta-tags on all my blog pages.

I then removed a few Made-For-Adsense sites I had put up (nothing huge though). Finally I removed this Affiliate site I put up for testing which some how got indexed.

Oh yeah I forgot, I also put a robot.txt in, the problem I had was discussed here and may help you:
http://www.v7n.com/forums/seo-forum/42825-whole-site-gone-supplemental.html?highlight=whole+site+supplemental

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Stefan Juhl said on December 29th, 2006 at 5:08 am

Well, you aren’t doing too badly. Many of your posts/pages aren’t in supplemental. It’s mainly the comment feeds for each post as well as pages with very little content. Secondly it’s quite obvious why these pages are in supplemental.. Your internal linking isn’t too good - if the goal is to have it all well indexed!

The thing about comment feeds in supplemental is rather common for wordpress. Just consider how little link juice they get.. It’s close to nothing since they’re typically just linked from the corresponding post and it’s just like 1 out of 100 links on that page.

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Sander said on December 29th, 2006 at 5:10 am

Found this trick to show the NOT supplemental results just by adding a , to the above shown query.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=site%3Ashoemoney.com%2C&btnG=Google+Search

It shows around 1400 pages that are not in the supplemental results and are cached at a regular basis.

So your website is doing great in google:)

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andrew wee said on December 29th, 2006 at 6:22 am

damn, i would kill for 31k uniques like you had on the 27th Dec.
go Digg!

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Jeremy said on December 29th, 2006 at 9:20 am

LOL, #5 on the top search phrases is just the word “fat”. More than “Jeremy Shoemaker”. For some reason I find that amusing. Which SE is sending that referral? Must be MSN cause they know what this site is really about

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ShoeMoney said on December 29th, 2006 at 9:27 am

sure I can go back through my email and see when people first started sending

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ShoeMoney said on December 29th, 2006 at 9:28 am

ya front page of digg/delicious/bluesnews/stumbleupon brings the heat

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Dave White said on December 29th, 2006 at 9:37 am

Well I think that at some point everyone/webmaster has to go through this.I think you should focus on how to get rid of this as soon as possible.

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Charlie Ahern said on December 29th, 2006 at 10:50 am

I’m a newbie (possibly passing through). Someday I’ll figure out why “paris hilton” and “dodge charger” would place second & third on the Search String ranking. Hmmm…wonder if the “salma hayek” - “dodge viper” demographic is covered.

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Shane Pike said on December 29th, 2006 at 12:32 pm

Yeah, adding unique META descriptions to those pages will almost certainly get you out of Supplemental if you’re at all interested. Lots of people are noticing Google’s recent reemphasizing of the description tag, if only for issues like this one. See
META Tags are Dead. Long Live META Tags! for more examples.

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Andrew Johnson said on December 29th, 2006 at 1:13 pm

I was looking at Google Blog Search a few weeks back (http://blogsearch.google.com) and noticed I was outranking you for all kinds of stuff (e.g. “affiliate marketing” “azoogle”), and I was thinking, what the hell is going on here? I thought may be Google just didn’t like you!

Looking at your stats you recieve exponentially more traffic than my little blog, and I am sure you have many more relevent incoming links. It must really suck for non-technical people trying to run a business online.

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Matt said on December 29th, 2006 at 3:42 pm

I nearly shat myself when I first looked at the daily visitor tallys for your domain. Wow.

The supplemental issue is quite peculiar. Who would have ever thought that META tags would be of any real use in 2006……

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Yuri said on December 29th, 2006 at 7:11 pm

Just removing the /feed/ URLs with robots.txt file and using a plugin to show unique meta tags might do the trick.

Overall, though, most of your popular stories are bound to have lots of links, so it should be fine there.

Linking to your previous posts might help, too, but like you said, focus on what you like to do, than on SEO. Not that you write this blog for money, right?

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Hannes said on December 29th, 2006 at 10:31 pm

It’s interesting to see “paris hilton” having quite a few entries in the “Total Search Strings” stats
Did I miss your post about Paris Hilton?

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ShoeMoney said on December 29th, 2006 at 10:44 pm

http://www.shoemoney.com/2004/10/11/so-i-met-paris-hilton/

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G-Man said on December 30th, 2006 at 12:41 am

Heh. I’ve got the same problem. I’ve been trying to fix it but Google thinks the important text on my page is the stupid sidebar on the right with the links. Bleh…

/shrug

When I get more time I’ll look into it I guess.

It’s not like I’m making a lot of money from my blog anyway
G-Man

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Clint Lenard said on December 30th, 2006 at 11:11 am

It’s amazing how many visitors you still get from the AdSense check
But the Google post and the Microsoft/Yahoo post are fairly new and have, by far, the most traffic.

You’re the champ!

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Ship It Media To-Do List said on January 2nd, 2007 at 3:54 pm

[...] I mentioned before that one of my main sites is stuck with the large majority of its pages in the Google supplemental index. If you didn’t read the post, go read it–the supplemental index blows, and Google traffic is pretty much nonexistant to the site at this point. Remarkably–and, well, due to my talent in gathering traffic from other sources–we still had one of the largest traffic days in history this week with over 10k pageviews, but let’s face it, Google traffic rocks and I need to do something to fix this situation. There was some commentary recently on Shoemoney’s site regarding supplemental results and several readers had suggestions for getting pages back into the main index, so I’m going to follow up on some of those. I’ll let everyone know exactly what I’ve done and exactly how it turned out in the future. [...]