Michael Goldberg tagged me.
I was also tagged earlier by SEM Zone and I even wrote a response but I forgot all about it.
So, should I post a serious reply, try to be funny like Wayne Knight fumbling through
Thank God You’re Here, or write a link bait piece like I was Rand Fishkin Jr.?
I suck at talking about my cats, so I’ll let my honesty bore you to death.
In December 2005, one of my money sites went completely supplemental. I’m talkin’ a 2000+ page site reduced to 3 pages. This was back before Big Daddy when no one had a clue about the supplemental index. On WMW, everyone was fixated on duplicate content, gs1md leading that discussion with a ton of insights into combatting canonical issues. The
SEO “experts” outside of WMW didn’t have much of a clue. For example,
This is the first article I ever read about supplemental results, written by Jim Boykin:
Now, for the dirt - how to get out.
1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.
(Love your blog Jim, but first impressions die hard :D) On Sept 6, 2006, Ammon over on cre8
said this about the supplemental index:
Supplemental usually means “Google knows of this URL, but has not spidered the document recently for it to be in the main index”.
As late as Nov 2006, in reaction to my post claiming low PageRank was the primary factor producing supplemental results, Rand Fishkin
responded:
I think it’s bogus - maybe it’s the primary factor in that a huge number of pages that are no longer linked to (in site structures from large sites) drop into supplemental, but for most of the real pages that webmasters want in the index that get dropped, I don’t think PageRank is playing a big role.
Now, Michael Martinez bitched about my
Supplemental Results page being irrelevant, out of date, and first tier, (which, in retrospect, isn’t completely untrue)
The article may very well create a buzz and go on to become one of the SEO community’s standard references on how to deal with Google’s Supplemental Index. And the irony is that it’s wrong, even though the correct answer (as far as what I have seen work in the past few weeks) is buried amidst all the bad/good advice.
but what he doesn’t know is there was virtually nothing on the web about supplemental results in the Spring of 2006 which is when I started writing that page. Even though the page feels near obsolete now, back then it was ahead of the curve.
Anyway, during Big Daddy’s release, Matt Cutts mentioned that lack of trust in the inlinks/outlinks of a site leads to PageRank devaluation, which leads to low overall PageRank for a domain, which leads to pages dropping out of the main index - which
exposes supplemental results.
But guess what? No one was listening, or didn’t want to listen, because
They resisted letting go of the idea that PageRank is dead.
When you look at the mechanics behind any piece of code, you discover function calls, loops, if/then statements, variables. Like it or not, PageRank is one of those variables. While it remains inside Google’s code, it maintains its influence, however slight, regardless of what anyone outside of Googleplex wants to believe.
Marketers who excell at writing digg-happy headlines will tell you what sounds cool - but what do they know? For example, marketers say “trust” alot (yeah, I know, I do too). Trust in the scope of supplemental results isn’t about domains; its about links, exchanged links, paid links. It’s about pattern detection, not authority. It’s about link devaluation, not a ranking boost. Trust in the scope of TrustRank has to do with high PageRank sites penalized in search results when they got lousy link profiles. TrustRank doesn’t effect low PageRank sites.
But stuff like that bores the crap out of most readers. You want to read stuff that gets you more sales. You want to know how to game Digg. You don’t want to waste time trying to postulate theories about an uncracked algorithm.
If you look at my archive links, you’d notice I started this blog on March 2006, right around the release of Big Daddy.
So, I guess the one and only reason I started this blog is a selfish one - I used this blog like a sailor uses a compass while lost at sea.
Then again, I was never really that lost to begin with.
I’ll tag these guys:
Ireland SEO Marketing John Andrews Peter T Davis Red Cardinal Scoreboard Media Group Why in Elvis? Name Do I Blog? - Read More... 
