Google supplemental?

[hopster]

Whatever I do, I can't seem to get my site buggynews dot com out of google supplemental. There was initial improvement after several weeks, in that at least some pages other than the front page are now out of supplemental but I can't seem to make any progress beyond that first headway... and in fact, there are often setbacks.

It's been about 7 months since applying quite a few of the mods here, including the mixed mod re-write, meta tags, zero duplicate, gym sitemaps and rss, etc etc

The best I've done so far as I can tell is about 250 pages brought into the normal index out of a total of over 12,000 and then it shoots back down to where it is now, about 50 or so and goes back and forth.

Any specific advice here?


-Steve

[hopster]

The one thing I hadn't yet done, was the optimal tittle mod... so I just did that and we'll see if it makes a difference for me.

(fingers crossed)

[dcz]

Well first, if the supplemental result obviously means a bit less interest from Google, it does not mean your content won't show up in the search results.

It usually means that Google does not see any urge to massively crawl these pages, and that the content is few or poor. It's the case for example with threads where many images are posted but only few lines of text.

So, besides working on writing detailed articles that should not end up there, you can work on making your page as light as possible for guest, to increase the content's weight.

As well, url such as -http://www.buggynews.com/aftermarket-oem-parts-off-road-go-karts-mini-buggies-vf6.html could be a bit shorter and better targeted, it can help out, and it's SEO wise harmless to edit the forum title with the zero dupe

An occasion to work on you site's content I'd say.

The title optimisation mod will for sure help out, but I don't think it will be the one to raise all your pages out of the supplemental result. I think this is more content (text and final html code) related, since your forum is already really well SEOed code wise.


Working on backlinks should as well help out, 3 is really few.

++

[hopster]

As far as back links go... those are just 3 that google recognizes at this point, though there are many more.

For whatever reason, they dropped a bunch in the last few months even though the links are still there and those pages I'm linked on are ranked well overall. Google is weird that way.

I understand what you are saying about the forum names, and that could be something to work on.

What I don't get, is after the mods here, I did have some initial improvement, but it seems to be moving backwards without my doing anything and I do get lots of messages posted every day with content rich threads.

Rather perplexing, really.

MSN and Yahoo have me well ranked, and included, of course.


-Steve

[dcz]

It's obvious that Google made up some more strict filters for backlinks and applied them during the last Google dance, you're not the only one to have seen the number of backlinks decrease, with apparently no PR loss this time.

Yahoo is giving you a lot more, as usual : http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/se ... gynews.com

About the supplemental, it was already observed that during the redirecting upon migration, the supplemental pages first go back to the main index, after they eventually go back there, for the same reason it seems that first sent them here.

Can be content as well as just really old threads almost never linked back in your web site (far away in forum's pagination).

For this, mx sitemaps can help, by giving backlinks again to these and the optimal title mod too, since it's allowing the pagination indexing.

++

[hopster]

Yeah, I did the sitemaps mod a while ago, and it did seem to help a bit but then a lot of the sitemaps pages went supplemental as well!!

A few of them are still in the main google index, but not many. Even the main sitemaps.php page is supplemental at this point.


-Steve

[dcz]

I really think backlinking is the key here, you need more Google backlinks, and better if they are good ones.

How many backlinks Google is showing in your Google sitemaps account ?

++

[dcz]

Splitted.

[hopster]

496 total links being accounted to all pages in the google webmaster tools

[dcz]

With GYM sitemaps installed ?

[hopster]

Yes.

-Steve

[dcz]

Google sitemaps only list 496 urls where Google indexed 11800 urls (by the way, a lot of updated url in this listing since last time) !!!

This can mean several things :
1) Gym sitemaps is not properly installed or submitted to Google (you need to submit the sitemapIndex and only it).
2) Your board as a majority of private forums and most of these indexed url are post urls leading to the login box
3) you have a tremendous amount of duplicates (not coming form the zero dupe if you had doubts) from the previous rewriting (post urls again mainly because you most likely did not disallowed them in your robots.txt)
4) any combination of these three points.

Right there for example : -http://www.buggynews.com/buggy-banter-off-road-go-kart-mini-buggy-discussion-gf1.xml

I see 2832 URLs listed, I really wonder how Google could have missed that in the sitemaps control panel (by the way, if not already, you should activate cache on the module, 2832 URLs is not few and you don't want your server to update the list upon each call).


++

[hopster]

Sorry, I misunderstood you. I thought we were still talking about external links to my page.

Google lists 496 external links from other sites to various pages within buggynews in the utilities within Webmaster Tools.

URLs submitted via sitemaps on google tools = 12547

[dcz]

Oh I understand now, so 496 for all the links Google is supposed to know is not this many.
They must in addition be either really new or posted on few different domains and / or poorly ranked or related web sites for Google to only mention 3 with the link: command.

To me, this is definitely something that matters a lot here : backlinks, since you already have some content.
Then, these supplemental experience, like HB's seems to show us that once a page ended up there, it's harder to go out.
Because some of your page in the supplemental look as good a many other that aren't.

The important thing thus is to make sure your new content does not go there, like it was the case once, most likely because of the numerous duplicates a regular phpBB forum has (about 20 per topic page actually) without our mod rewrite.

Another reason could as well be because old topic are not very active any more, with a content that does not get updated, like at first, when the first post started to get commented regularly by members.
I'm pretty sure that, since SEs do have more and more ways to collect traffic data about the websites (toolbar, adds, statistic service and more), the way a page gets viewed does mater more and more.

You could try to select an interesting topic in the supplemental and post it for a while, and see if it gets better and after how long time.
Of course this experience would mean more scientifically if you'd wait few month until the migrating is fully over, but, still, for an URL that already went updated, would mean something about visibility and views VS supplemental.

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[hopster]

What I keep finding is that it's a mix of old and new topics that come in and out of supplemental. It's actually a mess. I can't seem to make heads or tails of which ones are coming out, and for what reason.

I'll have topics only a few weeks old that are already supplemental and then very old topics from last year of no particular importance and haven't been replied to in ages that are in the main index.