Stuck in Supplemental for months

A site we launched at the beginning of the year can't seem to shake the "Supplemental Result" no matter what.

The site has a large number of sub-pages which are well organized and linked as far as I can see. Most of them are marked as supplemental results and don't generate any visitors.

site:www.solutionlibrary.com results for page 9 and higher are all supplemental.

(direct site: link http://www.google.com/search?q=site:www.solutionlibrary.com&hl=en&lr=&en&start=80 )

Any suggestions?

 

Dupe Content?? My only guess.

 

The problem is your meta description - it needs to be unique on every page.

Cryo.

 

You also need some links deep in your site.

 

Those are automatically generated but should be fairly unique.

 

Perhaps your descriptions are too short? Compare the pages that are in the main index to ones in the supplemental index - the ones I saw which were supplemental seemed to be much shorter. Incidently, none of your solution pages seem to be in the main index.

53 thousand pages is an aweful lot of pages - you may never get them all in the main index. Incidently, some pages which have been tagged NOINDEX still appear in the Google results.

Cryo.

 

I added the NOINDEX to the subject/topic pages yesterday. This is a total shot in the dark, but the idea is to remove the pages we don't really want users to be landing on from SER. Hopefully this will clean up some of the SE indexes and get the actual problem pages to show up instead.

As for meta descriptions, they are all automatically generated based on the content of the problem page. It's not perfect, some will be very short some may be long. It's the only feasible way of doing it since manually going through 60k+ pages, and creating really good descriptions, is out of the question. I also doubt that those have very large impact on the SE as a whole.

Basically, all the pages we would like to show up in SE are supplemental, kind of annoying since the content on them varies quite a bit.

Would love to hear some opinions on managing/organizing such a large content base thats SE friendly.


Thanks!

 

Just from a quick glance

Metadescription, metakeywords and content is the same for all pages, if I was googlebot I wouldn't like it. Maybe try and change the script to use as a metadescription a unique phrase (ie catalogue of downloadable study materials about) plus only the X first words of the content.

Also more links and a few deeplinks would definetely help

 

just from my quick glance - 76 pages are loaded from the regular index for me - maybe it is just a temporary situation, but improving isn´t it?

 

/subject/topic/ pages are in the indexed, but the actual content pages that are above topic are all supplemental. It's been like this for months, so basically there is 60k pages of content that aren't in the main index. All those have their cache date stuck back in April of this year.

 

Lack of content is the reason. Make sure a unique, descriptive and relative description and title tag is used on all pages as well as linking throughout your whole site to those pages. Content is king and low content can put a good page supp.

 

The pages are definitely not low on content.

 

I would try to get links to the pages that are supplemental if you can.

 

I just looked at 15 of them and they were. Why do you ask for seo advice if you are telling the seo how it is? Is that backwards or what? I have reviews thousands of sites and no what google sees as low content and you got it.

 

Which pages were you looking at?

Keep in mind that some problem pages might have just a few words and others might have 1000 words.

Most should have decent content, for those that don't it's just how the problem is being described by the user who created it.

The issue is that every single problem page no matter if it has 10 or 1000 words is supplemental.

 

I noticed some pages have the exact same title.. "Math Others", "Physics Others". You might want to change the title for some of them. Also, like the others said try mixing your meta tag keywords and descriptions. I would also just remove the meta-tag keyword tags.. they're useless

 

Just because a page has 1000 words doesn't make it 'content'.

this one of course lacks content in both ways:
http://www.solutionlibrary.com/economics/finance/28564

For instance this page is not considered content:
http://www.solutionlibrary.com/business/accounting_business_analysis_financial_reporting/28116

And pages like this:
http://www.solutionlibrary.com/business/accounting_business_analysis_financial_reporting/18407

Are liking to enter the sandbox. For one thing the title is almost as big as the content. That looks like spam or automation and the relevancy of the title is shattered. Msot of your pages have these problems. They appear useless in googles eyes. And IMO humanly speaking I would have to agree.

 

I just don't buy this argument for pages going into the supplemental index. Check out this page. According to your argument this page should be supplemental too.

Do I think it content contributes - yes but I think there are other factors to consider. I think you need more quality links to your site - home page and internal pages.

 

Yes, there will be pages with low content because of the nature of the site itself. Theres simply no way each academic problem will be described in a 5 paragraph essay format.

There are thousands of pages on this site with great content and still end up in supplemental. Every single /subject/topic/problem#/ page is supplemental, no matter what's on it.

Unless Google requires every single page on a site to have great content, and if it they don't puts everything on the site supplemental, your explanation really doesn't apply.

 

No my arguement is 100% proven fact. A page with little or no content can easily get indexed, rank and get a PR if it has links. A high content quality page can get indexed and rankings without outside links. But a low quality, low content page with spammy-looking meta tags without backlinks is likely to get supplemental.

Please don't tell me I am wrong. you come to a seo forum and ask for assistance. I am giving it. I have been doing this for a long while and have assisted many webmasters with the SAME issue so don't tell me I am wrong. Do you goto the doctor and tell them what is wrong with you?