If you have already fallen victim to Google’s Supplementals Hell, you’ll be scratching your head wondering how to get out of the trap!

Well, when I found out that Google not only scans the main page of your blog, but also the archives, the categories, etc.. and naturally it finds a lot of pages or posts that are the same or surprisingly similar! One easy solution is to cut the number of categories that you put your posts in! I used to publish my posts in 2 or even 3 categories, but of course this would simply increase the number of duplicates found by Google! So now one post – one category! Of course, what do you do with nearly 500 back posts, most of which are double or triple categoried! Well, you have to go back and clean up the mess! And you can use the plugin Post Control to change categories for upto 50 posts a page ! Not so difficult, either.

You may also wish to remove other ways that you can find your posts, such as changing the  permalinks, not allowing posts to be found by date views as well! Keep experimenting! I’m busy doing this, but still no significant change on the Supplementals for me! Still nearly 50% are in the supplementals!
Series of Postings

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Step one in my short series about getting out of supplemental hell.

First step, I found out how many pages were actually hidden there. I found originally that it was over 52% of my pages. And the more I published, the more I found there. I have done comparisons with other blogs, and many have had similar results, but one or two have only 5 pages residing there out of over 325! Now that’s a rate I could live with!

Why is it important? This diverts traffic away from your pages because so many results that could bring up your blog are no longer being listed in the main pages. You could drive additional search engine traffic as a result of this! In my case, I suspect I could double my page views from Search Engines.

So, I found this great tool that I used to get the basic data. It’s called SEO for firefox. Click and read about the plugin for FF. It’s well worth it! Sorry, if you aren’t one of the 65% of readers who use FF for reading this blog! There may or may not be a tool for IE, but if you know about one that does a similar job, do drop me a line!

For many bloggers, having your pages go down the tubes to the supplementals can be a bit of a disaster. I recently found out that over 52% of my pages were hiding their, most of them including full posts and stuff that was absolutely great for Google. But nope! Now it’s around 48%!

So I have started taking some remedial action. I will be writing irregular postings updating the next step over the next few months and recording my success rate.

First step is here.

Kenneth