The first two parts of this series have been about the reasons why there even is a dichotomy of the index, how you can find out how many pages of your own projects are concerned and which criteria are responsible for a page to fall into the second index. From here on out, it depends on the particular project if you should take additional steps or if the amount of pages in the supplemental index is so minute that they will not cause any harm. If, on the one hand, there are only a few and irrelevant pages in the supplemental index, like it is the case for this domain, you can decide on not making any changes and just keeping an eye on the situation in the future. But should many and important pages have slipped into the supplemental index, on the other hand, actions are called for.

The first step has to be the discovery why the pages are being listed in the second index. Yesterdays items should be helpful with this, even though, as vile as it may be, there is a possibility that more than one of the items or a combination of any of them can be the cause. It is usually also a good idea to let someone who is not as involved in the project as yourself, take a look at it from the outside. These people could be webmaster friends, readers in pertinent forums or even apt SEO-consultants. The items that are found this way will have to be “treated” accordingly. Here are some ideas for those items that I talked about yesterday, ultimately, this is a process that is very distinct and has to be tailored to the specific project:

Duplicate Content
The first thing you have to figure out is what kind of duplicate content you are dealing with. If other sites are using your content without permission then you should take legal actions against them. Depending on the place of residence of the operator this can run the gambit from very easy through complicated to utterly impossible. Thankfully Google has cared for such cases and will handle DMCA-requests relatively quickly. If you are syndicating content, be it as a RSS/XML-feed or otherwise, you should think about which content you want to give out and to whom.

Should you acquire content from suppliers, which is also send to many others, you will have to think hard about which content you can adopt directly and which will need to be rectified. You are getting an extreme amount of content, XML-files from Affiliate-networks for example and the reworking and amening of the descriptions and content would cost way too much effort? In that case Google seems to have already reached its goal. The times, in which domain names pointed to the commercial character of the site and 10 Espotting-links were enough content are over for a while already.

If you have internal duplicate content, if, for example, blogentries are being teasered too often, then you will have to try to reduce them. Promising methods are increasing the number of teasered entries per page or reducing the length of the preview.

It is important that both the title- and meta-description-tag are different and adjusted individually. There are many tools or publishing-systems that will often input the same entries for both, by default. You will have to adjust them accordingly. Before you get meta-tags with identical statements, you should rather get rid of them altogether – you will not be able to get around this work for the title-tag.

Bad internal linking
As I implied yesterday, the internal linking and linkstructure is one of the fundamental subject matter of OnPage-optimization. This is where you are able to make a lot of mistakes, many which will be grave, but you will also have the chance to gain a noticeable advantage over your competitors. For one you have to make sure that, through internal linking, all pages can be accessed from the startpage though short (click-)paths. It is also needed that both the quality and quantity of the internal links mirror the value of your site. Some possible ways of achieving this are sitemaps, for example, or small, internal subject-hubs, which link pages that belong to one subject. You should be careful not to let your sites decline to pure “link deserts”. You can keep the rule, to limit the number of links on one page to about 100, in the back of your head.

Little to no content
Most projects – especially those that are using pre-build forum/blog/CMS-software – have a number of pages that do not offer any added value. It is quite common for every forum-user to have their own page on which there is no other information than the last five to ten contributions; blogsystems have paging-options that have no use other than adding a lot of pages and content-management-systems start out by creating a large amount of default-pages which are then never filled with content. Comb through these pages and try to get them out of the index. You can do this either through the Robots.txt or through the use of the Robots-meta-tags. As an alternative to this, you are also free to just delete these pages. Just as I have mentioned in another article, your goal, today, should not be the inclusion of as many pages into the Google-index as possible, but the inclusion of as many quality pages as possible.

URL-structure
Just as I wrote in the SEO-tutorial, it is extremely important to make the correct choice of a good URL-structure early on. Sadly, many of the pre-made solutions but also many of self-written websites are not apportioning the URL-structure as much worth as it deserves. If you are constructing projects from static HTML-pages then this is still quite easy, in principle: keep to the established rules (descriptive, short domain names, dash as separator) and your webserver and Google will take care of the rest.

As far as dynamic sites are concerned, this will get noticeably harder. Should you be using parameters, keeps the number of them small and simple. Under no circumstances should Session-IDs get into the Googleindex, additionally, you should avoid parameter-names that are reminiscent of session (sid, s, session). If you are using Mod_Rewrite or similar techniques to create “handsome” URLs, make sure that your site is only available through one address. In pre-made solutions, the sites are often found under the old, parameter filled URL as well as the new, descriptive URL and the Googlebot is left to pick the site it wants to include. It will usually decide to keep the site out altogether or put it into the supplemental index.

Incoming links
For the small, Gallic village it was the magic potion, for searchengines it is the external, incoming links. Both of them have the power to turn slender and inferior market-players into huge and strong guys. The larger the amount and the higher the quality of the links that are pointing to your site, the more trust Google has in you that the mistakes, that you are making, are not deliberately. Now, when you are trying to escape Google's supplemental index hell, I can only recommend that you will also put an accompanying effort into getting new and good links – having said this I have to make clear that this does not include directories or articleservices.

I hope that, in this three part series, I was able to convey some – hopefully correct – informations about Google's supplemental index. Those of you who have now decided to make some corrections to some of your projects, should know that the way that leads out of the supplemental index is, by far, harder and longer than the way that leads into it. Changes will not show up the next morning – make sure you are hording enough coffee, tea or beer.

Part I: Supplemental index – second class websites?
Part II: Supplemental index – how did I get here?
Part III: Supplemental index – how can I escape the Google Hell?