It is that time of the month for me again when I start my major link building process. However, looking at some the directories out there one thing I have noticed is that alot of directories are plagued with supplemental results. So here is my tip to help you get them out. The most important thing that you need to do is make sure that you set up the 301 redirect to redirect your non www to www or the other way around. If you do not do this then without question you will be effected by the supplemental results. Next, make sure that you at least have a different title tag for each category. If you have time to do so then make sure that you right a unique description for each category, or you could just remove the meta description tag altogether and the search engines will right one for you, I really do not recommend that you remove the meta description but it will help if you do not have the time to write one. That is all you really need to do, give google a few weeks to recrawl your site and pick up the changes and you will start to see the amount of supplementals go down. And don't be lazy by putting it off till later, it will take you less than 2 minutes to set up the redirect so it is worth taking that small amount of time to do so. Hope this helps you guys.
Great tips! I'd also suggest to put into robots.txt a disallow for add.php or anything that has something todo with submitting a resourse to the directory, imo non-relevant information to a search engine.
Thanks for the tips, will get that 301 redirect sorted ASAP, unique descriptions are going to be a pain in the ass.
supplemental pages are usually due to duplicate meta tag content, especially title and description. Though redirecting one of your domain URLs is helpful, I don't think that causes a supplemental penalty. G is actually smart enough to recognize domain URL even though initially they may not recognize the both. 301 redirection is rather helpful to concentrate PR on one domain URL. I have one site without 301 redirect, having PR on both www and non-www domain URLs. G eventually found that both are same
Which directory do you own again? I'd like to check it out, I know you have one but I just can not remember the name.
Is there any directory that have more than 1000 page indexed and non supplemental ? I just try search in google with site:yourdomain command and set my preference to 100 results/page, and surprisingly I haven't find any directory that pass the 10th page yet. I've tested it against popular directories and directories that have unique description. It is very strange, try it with your directory.
If you have www and non-www both in google ,you can try 301 redirect, or it is not necessary. But I have set up 301 redirect before there was 2 url in google
Those are great tips - but IMHO ultimately the key to reducing the number of supplemental pages is to get more links, especially from trusted websites.
I'll agree with that point as well. I mentioned the 301 as the most important because non www and www will in most cases be exackly 100% duplicate and therefore one of those pages has to take the fall, and even though google sees these as different url's the content is an exact match to another page.
Actually, it's not a directory. Just a regular site. But supplement penalty is usually due to excess duplicate meta tags on web pages. I believe G probably won't penalize for that if you have only few of them, but say, if your pages have exact meta tags, 10 of them, G will most likely penalize them. PHP based sites tend to have many pages with exact same meta tags by default unless you take care of each page. I have experimented on this one some time ago, but it's not too harmful even for your rankings though some think having too many supplement pages can hurt the rankings. The only way your site could hurt in the rankings is if those pages got good content that G wants to rank well.
I am the king of Sumplemental results In the beginning of the year, I made www.searchtified.com as a testing site, this was a site that I wanted to have no Sump. pages. I writen unique descriptions on most of the categories and added high-PR sites and written unique descriptions to it, the first month was great, then eventually most categories wound-up becoming in the sump-hell. The only thing that is not on sump-hell are the blog pages. But onething with this experiment though, I have tested it and learning as I went, even paying a price. ..Yes I do have a 301 redirect on all ,my dirs.
Here is a link I found for the related topic at Matt Cutts' blog http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-url-canonicalization "Q: Okay, how about supplemental results. Do supplemental results cause a penalty in Google? A: Nope." That was rather way too plain, and I think Matt meant that if supplement pages can cause a direct penalty in SERPs.
Here is a better one: Options +FollowSymLinks RewriteEngine on # Rewrite index.php to / RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index\.(php|html?)\ HTTP/ RewriteRule ^index\.(php|html?)$ http://www.yoursite.com/ [R=301,L] # Rewrite non www to www RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yoursite\.com RewriteRule (.*) http://www.yoursite.com/$1 [R=301,L]
you can put in the first line also there is a tutorial by Nintendo search in the Apache Forums here in DP for that