For weird reasons, the following long comment wasn’t posted successfully. Hence I’m reposting this comment as a post. I think it’s really worth reading, I’m not sure if I agree with everything in it (I’m not exactly an expert!), but here it is anyway. It was written by Elizabeth Adams in response to a posting indicated below. I’d certainly welcome your thoughts! Do check out Elizabeth’s website, it’s worth reading!

Elizabeth Adams | eadams @ silverlink.net | elizabethadamsdirect.com

Re … Google’s Supplementals Hell, Part 2 … 06/03/07

Hello, Kenneth …

You wrote, “It’s not that the posts are published twice, it’s just that the cross-linking in blogs allows Google spiders to find the articles more than once in different places. It appears to Google that the article is published more than once, but in fact there is only one article, published once. There are multiple references to it at the same time, so Google’s ‘smart’ spiders think it is multiple posts!”

I don’t understand. How can a link be misinterpreted as content? Or two links as duplicated content? That doesn’t make sense.

Could there possibly be some other reason besides “multiple references” why articles are being swept into “Supplementals Hell”?

About a year ago, Google’s Matt Cutts said that “PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results” and that “typically the depth of the directory doesn’t make any difference for us; PageRank is a much larger factor. So without knowing your site, I’d look at trying to make sure that your site is using your PageRank well. A tree structure with a certain fanout at each level is usually a good way of doing it.”

So … well, is your site using your PageRank well? Is your tree structure fanning out a certain amount at each level?

(giggle!) I actually sound like I know what I’m talking about!

Marcia on WebMasterWorld said, “Not one single speck of duplication, what’s Supplemental and what isn’t on the test site(s) is 100% dependent on the amount of link love the pages are getting.

“People who are looking for dup issues where none exist are, unfortunately, chasing their tails.”

Halfdeck of Seo4Fun said, “Answer me this. How can a computer program read, understand, and judge the quality of an article in comparison to other articles written on the same topic? It can’t – until Google discovers Artificial Intelligence. Sure – there are ways to look for on-page spammy finger prints (e.g. illogial sentence structures, excessively high keyword density, overuse of bold and italics). But given two well-written articles, how does a machine decide – based solely on on-page text – which article is more valuable?

“It can’t.

“Relevance for a keyword can, of course, be guessed at by looking at things like the TITLE tag, keyword frequency, keyword location on the page, and keywords in H1. Relevancy, however, has nada to do with page value or page quality.

“How can a program judge the value of a page using on-page text alone when, from its POV, everything looks like a random string of symbols? To gauge a page’s value, there is simply no other option than to analyze off-page factors.”

Your PageRank is 3/10, which seems pretty good to me. How’s your “link love”?

Regards, Elizabeth …

P.S. When are you going to enable smilies?

There’s also more reading at What are Google Supplemental Results? : SEO Book.com

I’ve blogged about Adsense in the past, and in fact, this blog has had some problems with Adsense in the past, so I placed the Adsense ads with some trepidation. Anyway, I wanted to wait until I reach several thresholds before adding the adds:

1. my check came for previous revenue;
2. I passed the 100K for Alexa and Technorati;
3. I reached a 1000 visits in 30 days, not uniques.

All of these came to pass in the last few days, so I thought I would enable Adsense again. I’ve only put them on the main pages BETWEEN posts. I’ve placed 3 sets of large size blocks and they are blended, take a look at the image.

Unfortunately, my timing wasn’t good, as the traffic dropped significantly since last week! Summer is coming and people don’t want to be indoors, I guess!

I know this placement isn’t optimal for revenues, but I didn’t want to place them right at the top or in the sidebar (too crowded already). So, we’ll see what impact it has or if I need to move them.

I respect readers may not wish to see Adsense, so if you are using FF, you can download Adsense blocking software, like AdblockPlus.

Getting traffic to visit our blog requires a lot of work, and making sure that traffic stays requires good content! Sometimes, though, we needlessly send traffic away even though we want them to stay! Here are some of the ways that I’ve found that sends traffic away:

1. too many ads – sometimes we place ads to get clickthroughs or sales, but we tend to give them preference over our content. In other words, we spend a lot of effort getting visitors, they visit, see ads and click away almost as quickly!

2. too many external links – perhaps our blogs have too many links on them that encourage visitors to click away. I’ve seen blogs that have lots of dozens of entries in the blogroll, each one is a temptation to click away, if the current post isn’t what you are interested in.

3. poor design – we all add features to our blogs like mailing lists, comments, purchasing plugins, etc. but we need to make sure that when we use these features, we don’t inadvertently send traffic away, by forgetting to enable options that send the customer back to your website. Here is a good example in the jpeg of a website that had a mailing list, I entered my name, and was taken to this page, but what do you not see? A way to return to the previous page, just an invitation to click to close the page. Boom! Visitor gone.

4. slow loading pages – often new bloggers add all sorts of crap on their new blogs to make sure that their new blogs look old. In fact, more often than not, new blogs look exactly new for that self same reason. But a much bigger problem is that, for various reasons, if the items aren’t loaded on your server, they must be taken from somewhere else. Quite often, these images will slow your server down; and occasionally, may prevent your pages from loading at all – I’ve had problems with Adsense in the past, Adbrite (too awful to mention), Payperpost Affiliate images, etc. And remember, millions of people still DON’T have broadband!

What other ways do we send traffic away? Have you ever made that mistake? Tell us your ideas!