Blog Indexing Question: My ranking for my core keyword went up, but most of my site was recently put in Google's Supplemental Index, and I saw my income and traffic drop sharply. I have not built any links recently or made any changes to my site. How can I fix this and get my site top rankings again?

Answer: Google has been tightening down on their duplicate content filters. They have also been using PageRank scores to determine whether to index a page, if they should stick it in their supplemental results, and perhaps how strongly they should apply various filters (such as duplicate content filters).

Between slightly lower internal PageRank scores (minor issue) and increasingly aggressive duplicate content filters (major issue) and significant duplication from page to page on your site (major issue) much of your site is in Google's supplemental index.

Get Real Links:

Google's Matt Cutts stated:

In general, the best way I know of to move sites from more supplemental to normal is to get high-quality links (don’t bother to get low-quality links just for links’ sake).

Since you said you have not built links in a great deal of time and few people are talking about your site in the active parts of the web the key is to write more about things that people are talking about or would comment on. Great content helps build links. You have to keep blogging if you want to keep your mindshare up.

Others pointing more link equity at your site from external sources should help improve your PageRank scores. PageRank is a large part of what is used to determine if a page is of high enough quality to stay indexed (or put in the supplemental index), and how aggressively duplicate content filters (and other filters) should be applied against it.

If you get strong editorial deep links from other bloggers that should also help search engines crawl that portion of your site better to make up for any information architecture related issues that may be causing certain portions of your blog to be inadequately crawled.

Make Longer Posts:

Since your posts tend to only be a sentence or two long, most of the pages are rather similar to each other. You may want to post more text in each post, and turn comments on to have more unique text on each page.

Reduce Sitewide Repetitive Features:

You need to make your page titles and meta descriptions unique on each page.

You may also want to resort your code order to put unique content higher in the page content and have duplicated and sitewide template related issues occur later on.

Don't Link at Garbage:

Since your site has a rather low PageRank you may want to only list your blogroll on your home page instead of every page of your blog. Take out other parts of your site that heavily duplicate each other from page to page. Also consider removing your sitewide links to some of the unimportant pages on your site to flow more of your link equity throughout your site.

I would also recommend removing the tagging pages on your site as your site is already navigable via your categories, and the tags create low value noise pages that reduce your link equity distributed on the quality pages. I also think it is foolish to link at all those auto-generated Technorati pages...that wastes a lot of your link authority. I would also recommend not linking to some of the pages you don't want Google to index, such as those printer friendly pages. You may also want to block those printer friendly URLs using the Robots.txt protocol.

You have canonical URL issues which can be fixed. If www.mysite.com and mysite.com are showing different PageRank scores 301 redirect the less popular version of your URL to the more popular version.

You also have a few broken links on your site that could be fixed.

All these changes should facilitate better indexing of your blog posts.

Issues for Commercial Sites:

Many commercial sites (especially thin product database sites) also fall into the Google Supplemental index. The above examples all apply to those types of sites, but in addition you could consider the following

• add an editorial element to your site to improve your sitewide authority score

• enable customer feedback and reviews to get more unique content on your pages

Keep in mind that if you do not do any offline marketing or much marketing outside of search, your site is more prone to large swings from search related fluctuations than some other sites which have more brand equity and/or do other forms of marketing.

We launched ReviewMe today. And reviews are coming in, including one from Tech Crunch. Yippie.

We are giving away $25,000 to help speed along the user adoption and quickly learn from reviews.

Dave Taylor recently spoke about blogging at Affiliate Summit. Dave posted the video online here. It is a nice introduction to blogging for those who want to understand the benefits of blogging and how it can help improve their businesses.

Occasionally websites get really good comments, but if you get much exposure it is going to take a while to clean up all the overt spam attempts that exposure brings, especially if your topic is SEO...many people are attracted to SEO because they want to make money without doing any real work or creating any real value. I think that is part of why I liked it off the start.

And if you don't keep it clean, the next thing you know people who have made decent comments on your blog devolve comments to the me too level and sign their name as #1 rated Viagra mortgage poker coupon. I just went back and deleted about 30 comments from a person who cleverly hit me up today with about 10 coupon comment spams. Thanks buddy! There are some things large sites can get away with that smaller sites can not. For example, About.com has sections on some of their pages named something like also spelled as. Unintentionally, I slip a number of misspellings into this site, and get roasted frequently for it. Although, nobody has ever told me why the grammar and spelling police typically give dysfunctional useless feedback like "you misspelled a word" often without saying what word / where / how you misspelled it.

But if you left comments on your own blog not under your own name then spelling errors might be more appropriate. I have even seen some people take leveraging their comments one step further and troll on their own site to pick up other keywords, make the blog look active, or create fake controversies.

If you do not actively check out the comments it is not worth even having them on your site. As search engines get better at linguistics (and eventually they will) having a bunch of spammy comments on a site will linguistically link pages to a bunch of other spammed out sites and spammy topics. If you lose a bit of distribution here and there in a couple important channels competing sites get to enjoy self reinforcing market positions.

This guy wanted to be seen bad enough, so I may as well feature him

this webmaster doesnt want to help you.....
i have a good website where you may find coupons for google, yahoo, MSN, looksmart, but this webmaster delete my messages all the time....
i wont give up, i will post my messages again and again....

How absurd is it to threaten me with continued spam until I leave it published? That jerk had a new PHPBB driven SEO forum which had one post on it. It offered the opportunity to get Looksmart coupons (affiliate links) after you made 50 posts AND linked at his new forum. He must have spammed my blog about 20 times before I banned his IP address.

Between that clown and some of the other blog comment spam that has been hitting my blogs recently I was becoming quite scared as to the current state of humanity and the concept of evolution. Then I realized I should just laugh at those sort of people and everything was better again.

In spite of having Javascript required to post a comment on this blog, over 90% of the comments fall into at least one of the following categories: pure spam, of no value, unoriginal, point at adult sites or sleazy one page domain lander parking pages or sleazy lead generation / salesletter sites, or have keywords as the anchor text. I wonder if my sometimes infrequent publishing, coarse copy, and political views sometimes prevent some of the better potential commenters from commenting.

I will be the first to admit that I was probably a bit of a blog comment spammer when blogs were new, but considering just how many people are automatically and manually blog spamming right now I thing there is far more value in doing things which make the publisher want to like you and read your thoughts.