Google's Peter Norvig recently wrote an article called Reporters and Parrots, which, oddly enough compares reporters to parrots. I think it was partially based off of his recent frustrations expressed in his piece on global warming...which Seth thinks should be renamed to something more like "Atmosphere cancer" or "Pollution death".

Peter's parrot comparison is a bit hard on reporters, but if you know common reporting flaws you may be able to use them as a marketing angle. For example, if you can see a big deal bubbling up early make sure you plaster your lesser known angle or different angle early and often so you can later hear your voice echoed throughout the mainstream media.

After you feed them a few crackers you may be able to feed them other things as well, but you won't have a chance to feed them if you pick the same angle that is already well spoken for with better known experts. Of course reporters can misquote and you really want to be careful with how far you are willing to go to be quoted. Being seen saying the wrong thing to thousands of people might not be the best marketing vehicle unless you are creative and / or have thick skin.

Once you have an in from one story and reporters start trusting you then it becomes easier to get cited over and over again.

SEO Question: Much of my website is in Google's Supplemental index? What is their supplemental index? How does it work?

SEO Answer: What a timely question...where to start...well if the supplemental problem has only hit your site recently (as compared to the date of this post) it may be a Google specific problem that has caused them to dump thousands of sites recently.

Believe it or not, other than the home page most of this site is currently in supplemental results as of typing this, and with the current Google hole you can throw sites into supplemental hell within 72 hours.

Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, recently asked for feedback on the widespread supplemental indexing issue in this thread. As noted by Barry, in comment 195 Matt said:

Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I'm pretty sure what the issue is. I'll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don't need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.

In this thread SEM4U points out that 72.14.207.104 was showing fewer supplemental sites than he saw on others like 64.233.179.104.

Some people are conspiring that generally lots of listed pages were dropped and only the longstanding supplemental pages remain, but that theory is garbage on my site...since I still see a strong PageRank 6 Supplemental page that was recently ranking in the SERPs for competitive phrases (prior to going supplemental) that recently went supplemental.

I have done a site redesign just after this supplemental deal occured, but that was sorta in coincidence with this happening. One good thing about that MovableType update is that the last version of MovableType I was using created these aweful nuclear waste redirect pages...it don't do that on version 3.2.

As far as other reasons this site could have possibly been hit supplemental:

• too much similar text on each page - but I do think it is common to have common sales elements on many pages of a site, so I doubt that is it
• redirect links - affiliate links via Clickbank and the direct affiliate program might have flagged some sort of trigger if Google was trying to work on 301 & 302 issues... but whatever they did I don't think they did it better ;)
• Google is a bit hosed right now

What are supplemental results?

Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.

How does a page go supplemental?

From my experiences pages have typically gone supplemental when they became isolated doorway type pages (lost their inbound link popularity) or if they are deemed to be duplicate content. For example, if Google indexes the www. version of your site and the non www. version of your site then likely most of one of those will be in supplemental results.

If you put a ton of DMOZ content and Wikipedia content on your site that sort of stuff may go supplemental as well. If too much of your site is considered to be useless or duplicate junk then Google may start trusting other portions of your site less.

Negative side effects of supplemental:
Since supplemental results are not trusted much and rarely rank they are not crawled often either. Since they are generally not trusted much and rarely crawled odds are pretty good that links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much - if any - weight in Google.

How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
If you were recently thrown into them the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content manangement errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with Copyscape).

If you have pages that have been orphaned or if your site's authority has went down Google may not be crawling as deep through your site. If you have a section that needs more link popularity to get indexed don't be afraid to point link popularity at that section instead of trying to point more at the home page. If you add thousands and thousands of pages you may need more link popularity to get it all indexed.

After you solve the problem it still may take a while for many of the supplementals to go away. As long as the number of supplementals is not growing, your content is unique, and Google is ranking your site well across a broad set of keywords then supplementals are probably nothing big to worry about.

SEO Question: I have noticed many more content heavy websites in Google's search results over the last year or two. Why does it seem it is getting harder for commercial sites to rank?

SEO Answer: Within the commercial realm there are more and more competing sites. Building content, at one time primarily a hobby only project, has become far more lucrative in recent years. Not only have content management systems like Movable Type and Wordpress became cheaply or freely available, but AdSense and affiliate marketing have vastly increased the number of real and fake content sites on the market over the last couple years.

Duplicate content filters have improved, and many shell product catalogs have been filtered out of Google's search results. It seems like some older sites are getting away with some rather shoddy stuff in Google, but as they get more user data and more people create quality content you can look for the search engine to shift away from that loophole.

Search algorithms prefer informational websites over commercial ones for many reasons:

• they want commercial sites to buy their ads

• the search ads provide commercial results. they prefer to have some informational results to help balance out the search results.
• in competitive marketplaces there tends to be many more commercial sites than informational sites
• if multiple merchants have similar product databases it does not drastically improve the user experience to show hollow shell pages over and over again from a wide variety of merchants
• many quality informational sites link to related resources that lead searchers to more abstract answers that search engines are not yet advanced enough to answer
• many informational sites are monetized using contextual ads provided by search engines. those give engines a second chance at revenue after the search

Also keep in mind that most merchant sites focus on the same small core group of keywords. Anything involved with big business can take weeks or months to do...or longer if the company is big or the content management system is highly complex.

For a content based website it takes no time at all to do keyword research using some of the keyword research tools on the market, and then quickly create pages around common customer questions, concerns and buying points. If few sites cover those topics with specific pages then it is low hanging fruit waiting to be claimed. I think it was Peter D who said the key to making money on search was to dig where other people were not digging.

Yahoo! currently offers a paid inclusion program (sidenote: which I generally recommend avoiding) which ensures sites are indexed in Yahoo!. Yahoo! charges those sites a flat rate per click for traffic Yahoo! delivers. That per click fee means that for many search queries it may make sense for them to allow many commercial sites to rank in the search results.

As the largest content site, Yahoo!'s search results also offers quick links to many of their internal content channels, which lessens their need for content from other sources. Make no mistake though, Yahoo! has the ability to try to determine how commercial a website is. See their Yahoo! Mindset tool for an example of how results can be weighted toward either commercial or informational resources.

If you look at the Mindset dial and use it to compare the default search results from Yahoo! and Google think of Google as being turned much further toward research. If Yahoo! drops their paid inclusion program you can bet that they will dial their results more toward the research angle, just like Google is.

Some commercial websites, like Amazon, offer rich interactive features that make them easy to reference (both from a webmaster perspective and a search engine perspective), but generally most commercial sites are not highly interactive and most webmasters would typically be far more inclined to link to quality content sites than overtly commercial sites.

If you are in a competitive field it may make sense to look at Librarians' Internet Index or read this newsletter to see what sort of content sites librarians prefer and trust.

The average person on the web may not be as information savvy as librarians are, so it may also help to look at ideas that go viral by looking at sites like Digg, Memeorandum, or Del.icio.us.

You can also learn a lot content ideas by looking at some of the top ranked content sites in your vertical and related verticals which you are interested in and knowledgeable.

Even commercial sites can still be highly linkable if they are feature rich or offer quality answers to relevant topical questions that competing sites typically ignore.

Danny points at a SEW thread noting that starting next month Yahoo! will no longer allow competing businesses to bid on trademark phrases:

"On March 1, 2006, Yahoo! Search Marketing will modify its editorial guidelines regarding the use of keywords containing trademarks. Previously, we allowed competitive advertising by allowing advertisers to bid on third-party trademarks if those advertisers offered detailed comparative information about the trademark owner's products or services in comparison to the competitive products and services that were offered or promoted on the advertiser's site.

In order to more easily deliver quality user experiences when users search on terms that are trademarks, Yahoo! Search Marketing has determined that we will no longer allow bidding on keywords containing competitor trademarks."

Trademark terms are some of the most valuable words in the search space. While this move may not be surprising given Yahoo!'s past activities, will this move cause other engines to change their policies? How will this policy effect comparison sites which offer many brands on the landing page? Is Yahoo! trying to commoditize the search marketplace to help them make more money away from search?

They still support typosquatting and cracking sites away from search, but may that be coming to an end too? The recent Perfect 10 vs Google lawsuit points to newtwork quality becoming a more important issue.

SEO Question: I am interested in a topic, but am not sure if I should create a niche site within that topic or create a site about that topic?

SEO Answer: As long as there is a functional business model there it is almost always worth niching down a site. Having said that sometimes it makes sense to create a second site slightly broader nature as it will teach you more about how your niche fits into the broader category.

For a while a gave the advice that it might be a good idea to create a directory site one level above your category. For example:

• if you did link building you could create a directory of SEO resources.

• if you focused on SEO you could create a meta search engine, search rating system, or a site about search
• If you focused on currency trading or currency collecting you could make a site about currency or the history of currency.

The broader sites need not be directories specifically, just informational sites you can use to help learn about your market. Other advantages of creating a site that relates to your end business are:

• social networking: learn who the players in your market are. give them another way to find out who you are.

• learn more about your business: if your portal becomes popular you may be able to sell ad space on it. The categories with the most interest or highest paying advertisers may be good businesses to jump in. I can't tell you how many SEO companies create sites based on ideas from blowhard prospective clients.
• drive leads: The guy who owns StateCollege.com also uses that site to sell internet marketing services to local companies. You can target locally or topically.
• nepotistic links: while listing other good resources you can list your site near the top of your category to help build your brand. If you keep the site fairly non commercial and make it useful (to where you often find yourself going back to it to use it) then odds are you should be able to pick up some good links.

After you get established and know what niche you want to work in it is probably best to focus in on the main site, but off the start it does not hurt to have a foot in a few different ponds until you figure out what you really want to do.

Also worth noting that it is easy to get discouraged because sometimes the only thing separating you and success is time and there is only so much that you can force it. After a year or so the logarithmic and profitable growth really kicks in though.