I don't do much active monitoring of this sites results in Google but I noticed a pretty sharp decline in traffic and checked my logs and found NO incoming traffic from google. A quick poke around google showed it wasn't in the SERPs for any of the keywords it used to rank for. A site:sitename.com shows lots of pages indexed but all with "supplemental results" tags. I don't know much about supplemental but I didn't think an established site could get put there. The main page on this site is PR 3 as are many internal pages. Any idea on why a site would be moved to supplemental and how to get it back out?
Do you have the same titles & meta description tags on all pages? Do you have sitewide external links?
Titles are unique. Not sure about meta description. I don't pay much attention to that. There are a few sitewide external links in the footer.
Well thats your answer. Add unique meta descriptions on every page and remove the footer links. Also make sure there are no dead pages in your site. 301 redirect them to the homepage.
I had bought the site and didn't pay much attention to the meta tags. The description was the same on every page and the keywords was (over)stuffed (and the same on every page). I removed that and made the meta description the same as the title - is that bad? It was the easy quick fix. Lots of pages that already have a unique title set that I can use. Also removed "topsites" links I had on all pages and moved them to one page. Do I need to also remove all other external links from the footer? There are like 3 now. What if I redirect from a script on the site? Thanks for your help.
also check whether you do not have both www and non-www pages crawlable, if so, 301 redirect those you do not use
I don't have the non-www pages 301 redirected but I don't think that's an issue. I could be wrong though. I believe that almost all the inbound links are to the www pages. Site is: http://www.krustie.com/
Maybe not. Its still worth fixing though for the 10 minutes it takes. You have a lot of work to do on your meta tags and the urls. http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&lr=&sa=G&q=site:www.krustie.com
Are you sure about the sidewide externals? I mean every blog has natural sidewide external links in the blogroll and shouldn't get penalized for that. or is it just about footerlinks?
Its hard for google to tell which links are blogroll links and which are paid links. I guess the devalue all sitewide external links a bit.
I didn't notice that you mentioned a site. However, if you are using multiple variables in your page URLs that will cause you to go into suplimental on those pages. It seems that one is alright. More than that you take the chance of it becoming a suplimental page.
jnestor, being in your skin, I would try to explain what the code you offer really does. Writing only - add this code to your site - is not enough for Google, they still consider it a HTML and your sites therefore have almost no content for their bot and do not rank. Add the explanations, couple of words about it, really naturally written and you´re in. Also the title and description... if you really wanted; you would do much more than title = description; Another things: you are not limited to H1 and H5 tags only, you can dissect your topic much more with h1->h2->h3 etc having your topic related words in the tags; Get also another links than the MySite friends, they´re fine but you´ll have problems with placing keywords in your links, so do more with this...
In my experience, pages go to supplemental when those pages look pretty much alike to Google. I had a large number of pages go to supplemental ("Google hell") a few months back because each page contained a large index of links to all the other pages in the left column. The index dominated the page and was larger than the content on each page. I removed the index. It took about three months to get out of supplemental but now the pages don't rank well like they did before.
Good points all. Most pages don't have lots of variables in the url so I don't think that's the issue. The pages are relatively light on bot understandable content vs html for the menu and other features that are on every page. I'm not necessarily surprised that the site doesn't rank well. Rather that the site did previously rank decently and then got shifted to supplemental hell. Not sure what the reason for that timing was. I'll work on adding more content to the pages and better more detailed descriptions over time. Mostly however this is one of those - let it sit and earn money via adsense - kind of sites.
jnestor: Yeah, my experience was that the pages that eventually got sent to supplemental were some of the highest rated and best Adsense revenue pages on my entire site - for about two months. Only after that time did Google blow them out of the index. My point is that Google doesn't send pages to supplemental right away. The pages are indexed normally at first.