SEO and Online Marketing - San Diego Style

One of the more popular questions I’ve been reading about is how to tell if your website or pages in your website are in the Google Supplemental Index. Let’s do a Google search for…..rice cakes. Here’s the Search link in Google:

http://www.google.com/search?q=rice+cakes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a

This is the first page of the results (listed by 100). Using this example with other searches, your search results should show up in the first set of pages.

Now lets scroll down to the bottom of the page and click page ‘10′, scroll down to the bottom of page ‘10′ and you’ll see this:

The Phrase:

In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 926 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.

Means that you have reached the end of the main search results that Google thinks you would be interested in.  Any webpage or web site listed after this point are in the supplemental index. This means that if you don’t see your page in the regular Google index before the phrase above, your pages or site need work.

When you click the ‘repeat the search with the omitted results included.’  Google will now show both their main search results along with the Google supplemental results.

Now, one thing to note for everyone is that if you find your site in the Google Supplemental index it doesn’t mean that your site has been banned by Google it means that Google has deemed your site not worthy of being in their main search results for some reason.

Google has given the Death Penalty out to people in the past, most Notably Auto maker BMW’s German website. They did some really underhanded SEO work that Google didn’t like and the dropped their Page Rank to zero and making sure that it does not appear at the top.

Here’s more information about the BMW Death Penalty incident from two years ago from the BBC’s website:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/4685750.stm

Google has since abandoned this practice and now will drop your site down in rankings instead of handing out death penalties.

How do you get your site out of Google’s supplemental results?  That’s another story for another day.