Ok, you’re probably asking yourself what is Google’s Supplemental index and why do I care? If you own a site you’ll need to know this. If you’re a designer, you will need to know this as well.

Supplemental results are Google’s way of weeding out pages that are questionable or that have little value. Google determines this in a number of ways. I’ll talk about those in future posts. It use to be that new site were the only victim of the supplemental index, however this is no longer true. Pages of a site that show little worth (, repetitive tags, lack of content, stolen content) could fall victim.

New sites and sites recently re-designed are the easiest to fall into the supplemental. The culprit? Meta tags. Sometimes when a designer builds a site, he or she uses a page as a template, changing only certain items such as content and images. However, they leave the title tags and the rest of the meta data the same. When Google comes to index the pages of the site, it thinks these pages are all the same. So…they will not rank.

Sometimes developers are not responsible for providing content and to fill the blank space on pages, they use scrap or manufacturer’s content. Google knows the content is from another source, meaning it won’t allow that content to rank and will place the pages it’s on in the supplemental. E-commerce sites fall victim to this simply because many sites use product descriptions that are found on many similar sites.

Avoiding these common mistakes will save you some hardships down the road.

Tags: google, supplemental, results