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When Google loses interest in your content
To have search engines like Google continue to pay attention to your website you need two basic things, content and links, write poor content and you fail to get any human interest, fail to get human interest and you get no links. Links (though greatly misunderstood) still play a big part in pagerank algorithms.
In my case (descibed below) you can write good content in an area that is not friendly to natural linking with a sad result, you go supplemental and are put in Google’s trash bin. Just like the trash bin in Windows, junk is put there reachable but out of the public eye to later be removed if you fail to get any attention or break Google’s ever changing guidelines.
Content and Links – Links to Content
Content – Well written content describes what you are trying to say flawlessly using terms that fit. If you are writing a copy about “push lawn mowers” you do not want to go into a long rant about the flaws of self propelled mowers too heavy. If you do find yourself changing subject write a copy on the “flaws of self propelled mowers” and link to it from your “push lawn mower” review. At the same time do not be afraid to interject your personality into your writing. Use humor, philosophy, metaphor and spirit to paint a picture in your own unique words. You might also find that your personality alone can inspire others to link to you and pass the pagerank torch to your content (which keeps it’s flame from burning out).
Links – Well written content brings in earned organic links from website and blog owners you trigger an interest in, they link to your content and search engines notice you creating a buzz. Not all content influences incoming links so do not get too obsessed paying much attention to them in the beginning. Well, unless you have a website on a subject that does not bring in natural links (more on this below). A website needs few links but if you have none, forget about it, you are all alone on a deserted island. Search engine bots need linkage to follow to find your content so if you are not holding up a few flags via links/references on other people’s websites you get poor results, period.
I have a website that does not bring in natural links. It is called Lawn Maintenance Tips. Go check it out, read a page or two and tell me what you think, well written content right? So why are several of the pages in Google’s dreaded supplemental results then?
On first observation you might notice (as others did), that my site has few pages but a good toolbar Pagerank of 5 so why are those pages being thrown into the Google trash bin? The reality is that it is linked from my PR7 site. I will not go into it now but the PR8 (that gives my other site the PR7) is being devalued because it exists in a “paid” area on some else’s site (ignore this sentence if it confuses you).
Anyhoo, my lawn care site where I practice writing a better sales copy is more likely a PR3 with no relevant incoming links. My pages rank well for a few weeks/months then as I add more the older ones are put in Google’s trash bin because their is not enough fuel to float the ship. In other words, Google is throwing away perfectly good pages because they lack any measurable human interest in the form of links/pagerank. If I was to take these same writings and put them on a lawn care site that has trust in Google guess what? They would rank up there with the best and stick!
You will not find me crying though, my site will require some buzz marketing, I will have to do something extra special to acquire natural links because even though I love to review cool lawn care products and books, there are very few with websites (other than corporate sloth’s) that will link to my content. It is just a sad fact, the major “lawn” companies have handfuls of blogs owning Google, do you think they will link to someone like me without payment? Not!
This is a fact, jack:
Acquire a few links as you build content or end up in Google’s dreaded supplemental trash bin. I am not bitter and new pages still do well, it is just a shame to watch them eventually go into the bin simply because I exist in an area that is not friendly to linking to me.
Do pages that go supplemental come out of the Google trash bin when a site starts to generate human interest or do Google algorithms pretty much throw out your content? I kind of know the answer to this and have an example but am interested in others experiences in trash bin hell.
How’s that for honesty?
Kind of related:
GWHG Highlight: MFA (adsense) vs. MFA (affiliates)
Other:
Gone supplemental
July 12th, 2007 at 10:39 am
I owned a lawn mowing company for 12 years, so I look forward to the type of buzz you might be able to drum up. The most buzz I ever experienced was when the drought was in full effect and the weather man buzzed up some rain predictions.
July 12th, 2007 at 10:53 am
HA @ Keith!! :)
Well, rain is my thing, *starts to beat the drum*.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:20 am
Why don’t you try a Yahoo directory listing and some social bookmarking?
July 12th, 2007 at 11:34 am
I am not sure the Yahoo directory is really more useful than a link in one of my own.
All my websites are hacked up (in a good way) blogs, they take advantage of the “social” thing via tagging… lawn care just ain’t cool enough to attract links without some serious social manipulation and I do not like preying on weak minds…seems a bit wrong.
Think I will syndicate an article, (even though I see it as spamming) will write a copy so good that people will reference it,,, and even if they are poor links, it is better than having none, eh?
It’s a strange/new thing, never had a site that gets no links…kind of a little fun experiment in “SEO”, will lose no sleep over any of this.
July 12th, 2007 at 11:20 pm
Hey, good to see you blogging again Aaron.
“it is just a shame to watch them eventually go into the bin”
According to Dan Crow, director of crawl systems at Google, stale pages that don’t get updated often also might get stored in the supplemental index.
July 13th, 2007 at 9:46 am
Hi Halfdeck, well that is one scary statement by Dan because what if I sell a garden rake and have a 5 page site that never is updated?
July 13th, 2007 at 9:49 am
Aaron, Dan Crow also said that the supplemental index will eventually be merged into the main index.
If it’s important for you to rank those five pages, you probably should be updating them regularly.
Halfdeck, you were at the SEMNE event in Providence earlier this week I presume?
July 13th, 2007 at 8:07 pm
Nope, Peter. I read Jill blog briefly about it on Highrankings.
July 14th, 2007 at 2:38 am
“what if I sell a garden rake and have a 5 page site that never is updated?”
Aaron, I don’t see a high (internal) PageRank URL going supplemental no matter how stale it happens to be. My guess is freshness (and perhaps other factors Google hasn’t yet disclosed) comes into play when your page has borderline PageRank.
July 14th, 2007 at 5:51 am
I turned my 5-10 page product site into a wordpress blog to take advantage of rss and other features, whenever I change a page it moves around for my “keywords”, this is not good during the season when sales is highest. When it was a static site is was solid, and you are correct Halfdeck, pages that have enough pagerank stick even if they are of lower value than others (that is something that needs to change, we are not all PR whores Google!)
All kinds in interesting ideas can be taken from this stuff, what happens if I do not have enough PR and remove all the supplemental pages. Weee
I live in new england, should have gone to SEMNE but in reality I am not an SEO, just play one in virtual land, those Google employees do interest me because they know what fuels the mothership. ;)
July 15th, 2007 at 8:02 am
I wonder whether there is a case for saying that the internal linking may be an issue in this case? Nor dissimilar to death by pagination?
I see you link down to category pages, which in turn link to the content pages. Those category pages are just a number of links with little or no textual content. It might be worth experimenting with that.
The other experiment I can think of is to see if you can pop any pages out of supp by linking from the homepage. If so you might be able to keep more pages in the main index by managing PR better. (I see nofollows so I know you’ve worked on that.)
I think Halfdeck would be more expert to comment on PR distribution though ;-)
Rgds
Richard
July 16th, 2007 at 3:13 am
I don’t consider myself an expert, but like Richard I do notice your site is a bit top-heavy: category pages, sitemap, and a handful of articles got equal shares of 90% of the site’s PageRank while the rest of the site isn’t getting much attention (even though the average TBPR of your inside pages aren’t low.)
One thing I’m trying with my own site is adding more internal links to deep pages; that way less PageRanks float up to home/category pages.
One thing that’s worked is to add a link to a supplemental page in my sidebar. Sugarrae only has one supp page right now. It took me three days to push it into the main index. Around a week after I removed my links to the page, it fell back into the supplemental index. I’m pretty sure that test is reproducible.
As an experiment, I’d also suggest modifying the text on a couple of the supplemental pages and see what happens.
July 16th, 2007 at 4:52 am
Halfdeck – I use the same template on all my sites and the ones that have enough real pagerank are doing fine. Do not let my PR5 fool you, though it was free it sadly comes thru my other site from a paid area on a PR8 site.
I know EXACTLY what is going on now and wait for the day when Google can rely less on backlinks to determine a pages quality. There are a lot of good folks with outstanding content getting thrown in the bin simply because they are presenting their stuff from a domain with not enough PR. How lame is that?
It is also not in Google’s interest to allow us to control PR distribution though I appreciate the help from you guys.
In other news the latest pages are ranking fine as they wait to be dropped into supplementals if they do not get enough human interest in the form of links. See how it works?
July 16th, 2007 at 6:30 am
“Do pages that go supplemental come out of the Google trash bin when a site starts to generate human interest or do Google algorithms pretty much throw out your content?”
They come out, from what I’ve seen. It certainly appears it’s primarily a function of how your PR spreads internally, or the number of external links you get to the content.
August 6th, 2007 at 6:55 pm
Interesting views on the supp index, Aaron etal.
I’ve recently launched a WH site in a newly-born industry that hadn’t previously existed (in this country, at least). Only two months ago, Google’s Adwords keyword tool (and others) knew nothing about the industry and the new language-set that it created, whatsoever.
Today, they are beginning to trickle into the KW tools as the industry starts advertising, websites (such as mine) spring-up, and searchers begin searching for the KWs/phrases that I have built (quality) content for.
As you can imagine, it is an ongoing battle to source incoming links – I have resorted to doing podcasts with the MD’s of the new dominant industry players entering the market as a tactic. It certainly brings in the traffic (and the bandwidth!), but, most of the newbs entering the industry (who have set up websites) haven’t a clue about SEO (never mind building sites) so links are still very very difficult to attract from the small pool of sites available…
I believe it will pay off in the long run but in the meantime, I’m in a running battle with 2 other blogs – both on wordpress sub-somains (one is savvy (inflamatory linkbaiting etc…), the other purely taking advantage of free website). The other sites (rightly) above mine for some of the KWs are Government departments and NGO’s.
I have a blog attached to what I term as the main site, which has the static content meat and none of the trappings that blogs need to qualify for the name, “blog” (IE… No comments, tags, ping submissions etc…).
I think I’m beginning to see a pattern/trend, call it what you like, emerge as I track the wordpress blogs and my site in the SERPs.
My blog pages are all over the place – Think it’s definitely a freshness attribute. See it also with the wordpress blog-posts too – We shoot-up, then start to slide. I think it’s tied-in with the fact that the pages eventually roll-off the “promote to front page” and “recent posts” (sidebar) phenomenom. (Although my posts are not promoted to root, just the blog index page).
Meanwhile however, the static “content meat” side of my site has remained fairly constant – Occassionally trumped by a wordpress blog-post that strays into the keyword-space, but, again, it seems that as soon as they fall from WP’s “tag-cloud” (which seem to be very powerful), they slip.
I also have an old, unrelated, authority site which had a blog attached to it last year – Similar experience with the blog-pages; static content that I have relied upon remain untouched in the SERPs.
Blogs send all sorts of “noise” signals out that indicate that they are, essentially, conversational in nature, and as such, fleeting (Yesterdays news).
This is both an interesting, and frustrationed journey (I’m sure you’re finding it the same) – It’s one thing to carve your way into a thriving, “link-happy” arena that has plenty of pagerank, another to go into an uncharted an insular one.
Interesting read, Aaron – Sheesh, I really didn’t want to write all that, soz :o
January 18th, 2008 at 7:42 pm
I am also having supplemental problems. Its my first time blogging and i have been posting on my site for around 5 months now, however 94% of my pages are supplemental. Its quite discouraging for a new blogger like me to spend lots of time trying to create quality content, only for google to throw it in the bin. But i still try anyway.
i have been experimenting with how to get my pages out the sups, after playing around with the robots.txt and noidexing some pages to remove duplicate content, i decided to get rid of my robots and noindex as i did not see any results from them. I also changed my homepage to get my links on the main page. I will wait and see if this does anything for me.
if anyone can offer me help with how to get my site out the sups plz let me know, thanks my site is http://www.eruptingmind.com
January 18th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
Martin – You just need to do stuff to inspire people to link to you and share their pagerank. I know, that is the hard part…natural links. :)
January 18th, 2008 at 8:26 pm
Martin, neither robots.txt and noindex will block PageRank flow. Disallowed pages still accumulate PageRank. In other words, they’re not all that useful in dealing with supplemental results. META noindex,follow (or META noindex) is one possible solution (though I haven’t tested it myself). Rel=nofollow is another.
Bottom line: sadly, if you want over 1,000 pages indexed, your site needs to be relatively authoritative (by authoritatve, I mean a decent amount of backlinks).