I have heard of a lot of even well known companies being plagued by what is called “Google Hell“. Google calls it the Supplemental Index. This index was create for weeding out spammers. It looks for pages that are keyword stuffed, or duplicate content from original source pages. They have very good intentions, but this has been harming a lot of legit sites. All it takes is for Google to think you copied you content from another site and BAM there you page is in the supplementals. When really your site the original content and the other sites are the copycats.
When this happens to a page, whatever search terms your page ranked for is gone. And the problem is that the supplemental index is spidered a lot less than regular indexed pages. This means your page could be there forever unless you do something about it. Here are a few tips on getting out of Google Purgatory:
1. Get relevant inbound links to the page you would like to get out. This does two things: A. Google will hit that page more when it follows the link to your page. B. Creates a since that the page is important and relevant, after all most spam pages don’t get a lot of people from relevant industries wanting to link to them right?
2. Change the content on the page. Look over the content on the page and see if in fact it looks like keywords are stuffed all over the page. Even if they are not, change the content anyway. This will help you bee seen as original and not to be stuffing your page with keywords.
3. Submit a sitemap to Google’s Webmaster Tools. This will help get your site crawled faster. Also put a modified date of a resent date in your XML sitemap.
Those are just a few tips on getting out of the supplemental index. I think with some work and strategy there is no reason for a page to be in the supplemental for 6 months or a year as I have heard other people talk about. Change the page, get links to it, and get Google to crawl it.
When I see a site like www.mysolitaire.com and they complain they have 99% of their pages in the supplemental index it makes me wonder who their SEO person is. I guess they complained so much they ended up on forbes.com. But if you actually go to the site it is stuffed with links all over the place with rings and earrings. There are hundreds of links containing the words he is targeting. Even when they list the products, if its rings, the text for every ring is “view ring” 16 times on the rings section. Google is dinging him for having too many links with the identical word in the link hundreds of times on a page
