Well, I’ve been using a little Firefox Plugin to monitor my website’s page health after installing a wonderful SEO plugin called SEO_Wordpress.

The results are encouraging to say the least: the number of pages actually indexed by Google has fallen by 50% as has the number of supplemental entries. Also, the proportion of pages indexed by the supplementals has fallen slightly from over 50% to around about 45%. So proportionally more pages are indexed.

Unfortunately, the summer effect and my own several days of torpitude have lessened the amount of traffic, so it’s difficult to see any traffic benefit at the moment!

In theory, fewer pages in supplementals should generate additional traffic as the pages are likely to be more relevant. But the indexed pages are also fewer. So could I be cutting my own throat with this plugin? Well, I’m prepared to stick it out over the next few months.

In fact, more than one blogger has expressed skepticism about the whole ‘supplementals’ is hell religion. Elizabeth from www.elizabethadamsdirect.com wrote me just a few days ago saying several things:

 I think Google is attempting to buffalo us into thinking that the problem is all ours … that our content isn’t good enough, that not enough people like it and link to it,  and so on and so forth. But it’s not all ours! It’s a good bit partly theirs!

and

And the idea that you should be obliged to go around your blog turning yourself inside out so that posts wouldn’t be found in more than one place … that’s ridiculous! That’s what blogs do! It’s the nature of the beast!

Perhaps the whole thing is a storm in a tea cup, but until I have had a chance to check it out for myself, I won’t know the whole story.