Let's say you are writing new content and for certain keywords instead of first it appears immediately on the 3rd page or even at the end of search results. A possible reason might be that your website could have lost its trust-rank and have the so-called 950 penalty applied at runtime by Google. In order to restore our rankings here is what you can do. And in the meantime, you can learn a bit more about the SEO topic from my online course.
Check whether you need to deoptimize:
If you want to see all the non-supplemental pages from your just type in google:
site:www.yourwebsite.com/*
Then to see just the supplemental pages from your site type:
site:www.yourwebsite.com/ -site:www.yourwebsite.com/*
Keep the ratio below 50%
Also try the automated supplemental ratio tool: http://www.mapelli.info/tools/supplemental-index-ratio-calculator
What to do next:
1. Validate your website
2. If you use plenty of H1, H2, H3 tags remove most of them or replace 'H1' with stylized 'H2' or 'span' and 'strong' tags.
3. Don't use same data in: 'title', 'h1', 'meta description' tags.
4. In your website, inner-linking navigation uses the same linking structure. Using the same 'title' attributes in the menu on every page of your site is considered spam.
5. Your affiliate/referral links should differ in the anchor text. Please check the 'title' attributes to be unique and avoid keywords stuffing there.
Pay special attention to 'title' and 'alt' attributes: if they are overstuffed google bot will just place the first few lines of your page as a description in its search results which turns to be your repeating website heading information.
Solution: examine what your search results look like(site:http://www.yourwebsite.com), see what exactly indexes google and make according to changes ie. reduce the 'title' attributes.
6. Remove any static content from the bottom page of your website especially the outbound links, etc...
7. Check your affiliate links whether they are thematic or not. Remove those that are not connected to your site theme or add rel="nofollow" to them. If your site displays RSS feeds be sure to add rel="nofollow" also.
Update: Try this tool to find whether you are linking to bad neighborhood websites: http://www.bad-neighborhood.com/text-link-tool.htm
8. Lower your content keyword density
http://www.webconfs.com/keyword-density-checker.phpKeyword density is an important factor if you're serious in SEO. Once you have a great kind of content, the crucial part is to be able to present it in front of the right public.
And by having keyword density above, for example, the threshold of 2 - 4% will mark your content as thin and it won't compete/show with other websites in SERPS.
- check out your navigation (posts archive) - too many links to posts with keywords in their titles increase the overall post keyword density so be careful.
- when using forms you may also look over your hidden field values: do not use keywords there - it's an easily misunderstood issue.
- also, don't forget to check your content for being detected as potential spam:
http://tool.motoricerca.info/spam-detector/
9. Limit the usage of 'title' attributes in the <a href> tags as well as <b>/<strong> tags -> they weigh to the content presented in the SERPS.
These might sound like drastic measures but I've already managed to escape 3 websites using the above techniques. So experiment and look at what will happen. Wait and hopefully soon you'll be out of google's supplemental index too.
Load your navigation/advertising section using AJAX request not purely via JavaScript.
Check google's webmaster's tools and fix if there are any potential duplicate issues.
Check all of your sub-domains for supplemental results and fix them as soon as possible.
You know the benefits of organic SEO long-lasting effect versus the link - driven short term success. Here are some simple steps for your website to ensure a long term quality traffic flow from happy visitors.
My websites - full with unique content and constantly expanding, had a problem - plenty of pages gradually went to the supplemental index (ie. 50 out of 500 results were in the main index). After lots of experiments and reading below are my guidelines on how to organically do an on-page optimization or how easy to get more of your content indexed:
Paginated results
Ensure unique meta description wherever you can on your website, even on the paginated results: If you have an article with lots of comments - on the 2nd onward comments page strip the article text leaving just the comments. This way you'll create a brand new unique content page, just like in forums.
Repetition and bold text
Put special attention to em (italic) and bold tags - they add weight to the web page and if repeated through the pages, they could trigger google's penalty filter. Remove repeated word occurrences such as: Reply to this comment, Vote, etc... - replace such text using unobtrusive JavaScript.
Unique heading and meta descriptions
Look especially at the headings like H1, H2, and make sure that they are unique and not repeating.
Loading time
Improve loading time: inspect page loading time with Yahoo's YSLOW and Google's PageSpeed browser addons and try to make most of the suggested improvements. You can also press F12 to open up Developer Tools in Chrome or Firefox and inspect your content from the network tab to detecting slow-loading elements:
let's recap on the main speed improvements how:
- make cache version of your pages
- use asynchronous Google analytics and social sharing buttons such as facebook, twitter, etc.
- place all your JavaScripts at the bottom of your page - this way the page content will load first.
- gzip your CSS and js files
- beware of WordPress wp-cron.php file - it hogs the system CPU resources down and might get you banned from your hosting provider: just rename it or find where is used and disable all calls(includes) to this file, etc...).
Blogger users
If you use Blogger's hosting use this sitemap tool and provide the generated sitemap in Google's Search console. Benefits are that this way you can submit your all posts for indexing.
Canonical urls
Check whether your website is listed in SERPS listings both via http://yourwebsite.com , http://www.yourwebsite.com or http://yourwebsite.com/index.php
If that's the case you'll have to:
1. Manually rewrite all your: internal links to the already indexed/preferred (www or non-www) version.
2. Permanently redirect using .htaccess mod_rewrite your http://yourwebsite.com/index.html or http://yourwebsite.com/index.php page to the root domain of your indexed website URL (i.e http://www.yourwebsite.com/).
Link weight
Use Supplemental Results Detector http://www.seo4fun.com/php/pagerankbot.php to distribute evenly link weight between your pages.
Source Ordered Content
Display your content first to search engines via CSS - especially true for the new Panda update.
Log your results
Write in a text file the date on which you make changes, then check your statistics the next week to determine whether they are beneficial or not.
