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BELOW IS A TRANSCRIPT OF THE VIDEO:

…and welcome to another episode of seoFool, I’m John Elder your seoFool. And Merry Christmas from everyone here at….what? (look down at costume) Oh! Well that makes more sense doesn’t it? No we’ll just fix it in editing. Happy Halloween from all of us here at seoFool.com!!

In recognition of the coming holiday, I want to talk about something truly spooooky. The Google Supplemental Index….ooooh!

What is that Google Supplemental Index? It’s where web sites go to die. It’s a cemetery where google sends sites that aren’t good enough for the main Google index.

Maybe your site is full of duplicate content, OFF TO THE SUPPLEMENTAL INDEX WITH YOU..

Or your internal site link structure is confusing and complex, OFF TO THE SUPPLEMENTAL INDEX WITH YOU!

Or your site has low to no Google PageRank, OFF TO THE…well you get the idea.

Some other things that can get you into trouble are high page count, if you’re site has thousands of pages then your inbound link Pagerank juice, we’ll call it, sort of gets spread thinly among all those pages. Also a lack of what Google calls TRUST can also get you in the supplemental index as well as not having fresh content.

The point here is, you don’t want to get stuck in the supplemental index, and if you do happen to find yourself trapped there, you want to get the heck out as soon as possible. Now you can still show up in search results if you’re in the supplemental index, but only if there aren’t any other worthwhile sites for them to show from the main Google index, which doesn’t happen very often.

First off, how do you figure out that you’re IN the supplemental index? Well, Google used to put a little label on the search results that said “supplemental index” if a site came from there. But they stopped doing that a couple years ago though.

So here’s a quick way to find out if you’re stuck in the supplemental index. Go to Google and type in this search string: site:www.yoursite.com *** -view

That will show you all the pages of your site that are in the supplemental index.

So how do you dig your way out? Well there are several ways depending on WHY you’re in there to begin with.

If its a Pagerank issue, the simple solution is to boost up your pagerank. Get more quality web sites to link to your site. Don’t buy links because Google hates that. But maybe start a little link bait program or something.

On the other hand, if it’s a duplicate content issue, remove any duplicate content from your site. This can be an issue a lot of times when people use Wordpress blogs to run their site. Wordpress automatically and by default duplicates every post you make. Each post can be seen on your site’s main page, the specific post page, category pages, archive pages, and on and on. This duplicate content can be solved by tweaking your robots.txt file to tell Google to ignore category pages and archive pages, and on and on.

Check seofool.com tomorrow for an article on how to do tweak your robots.txt file correctly.

Finally, if your site has crummy internal link structure then you need to fix that. Tomorrow I’ll also post an article about a free tool that will help you with your internal site link structure.

Getting out of Google’s supplemental index can be a chore, but it’s not the end of the world. The hardest part is figuring out why you’re there in the first place. But since it’s probably only one of a few things, it’s not so bad.

No matter, what I suggest you do 2 things. First, clear up any duplicate content issues by tweaking your robots.txt file like I’ll show you how to do tomorrow. Second, work on increasing your Pagerank, which you should always be doing anyway.

That’s all for this week…be sure to watch past episodes and subscribe for free to my weekly seo show at seoFool.com and download my free beginners guide to seo eBook there as well, or follow me at facebook.com/seoFool or twitter.com/seoFool I’m John Elder, thanks for watchin, happy Halloween and See you next Week!