A few months ago almost all of my posts on this blog ended up in the Google supplemental index. The strange part of it was that several of my posts were listed on page one on the main index of Google one day, to only be found in Google’s supplemental index a few days later. I even had posts that were on the first page of Google for several months disappear.
At first I was absolutely baffled as to where these top listed posts were going. Once they were gone from page one on Google they couldn’t be found anywhere on Google at all.
The only way that I could find the posts was to run an Allintitle search on them which by the way is a good way to see if you are in the supplemental index or not because at the bottom of your listing it will say supplemental results. If you see that on your listing, you are in the supplemental index. Google’s supplemental index is not where you want to be because you will rarely be found.
By doing some research I stumbled upon a website that gave an explanation of why websites end up in Google’s supplemental index which I know about but had never considered it because it hadn’t been an issue since I had started blogging.
The reason that a website ends up in Google’s supplemental index is because of duplicate content. Google penalizes websites that have repeated content on their site.
A blog is structured to put your content in many places even though you’ve only written that content once. Everything that you write about ends up on the first page of your blog until it drops off after so many posts are written. Your post can also be found on the category index page, in the form of a single post, in the blog archive, etc. Even though you have written the content just once it can be found all over your blog and Google sees this as content that has been duplicated and that’s the main reason that websites end up in the supplemental index.
Google claims that the supplemental index is not for penalizing websites, nor will being in there hinder web searchers from finding your website. I can tell you from personal experience that it greatly reduces the chance of web searchers from finding you if you are in Google’s supplemental index.
There is a solution. There is a plugin that will get rid of all of the duplicate content that your blog creates. The plugin is called seo_wordpress. I setup this plugin a couple of months ago and all of my posts here are now back on Google’s main index. This plugin works really well folks. It does take a while to kick in but it definitely works. If your blog is running on wordpress software this is a plugin that you can’t do without. Here’s where you can download seo_wordpress. You can also get more information on this plugin by clicking on the corresponding link on the download page.
If you are having the same problem that I was having you really should get this plugin right away and get out of Google’s supplemental index once and for all.