Eclectic Echoes

Supplemental Results

What exactly are Google’s “Supplemental Results” ?
Anyone?

There seems to be lots of theories floating out there, but no real answers. One theory says it’s pages that are no longer linked in to a site, but I have a site that all the pages are linked, and have been, but all the results in an “in site” search show as supplemental results. They are dynamic and not friendly url’s — but then so are many other sites out there, especially ecommerce sites. Besides that is one frustration I have no control over…yet.

Another theory is that pages that violated Google terms, e.g., SEO keyword spamming or cloaking, end up in “Supplemental Results” hell. Well that certainly applied here. This site had been handed over to self-described “SEO Professionals” last May or June. The keyword spamming was rampant. I had no idea there was a longitude of “hot sauce, salsa, hot salsa, fiery salsa…..” but according the the old site’s <meta name=”geo.position”> tag there sure is. The “SEO’s” involved found every possible meta tag ever used (and a few I’m quite sure they made up!) and filled every one of them with some permutation of a 100+ keyword list. Then to be doubly sure they spammed it well enough, they also added the same lists as hidden text and in comments in the head and body of the page. Of course the first thing I did to the site was go through every page and remove all the SEO stuff. That was in September.

After removing all the “SEO” keyword spamming, the site got cleaned up quite a bit, all the FrontPage cruft was removed – how many font declarations does it take to style a single   – and the layout was converted to XHTML and CSS. In general, while the look of the site was left alone – for now – the site is much improved. The home page (www.salsaexpress.com) has been reduced to 30% of the original’s download size and all the subsequent pages have been reduced by 60–80% as well. All that savings from getting rid of the FrontPage markup and moving to XHTML + CSS. The savings there has translated well in much lowered bounce rates from CPC ads and organic search results. I can’t even imagine how the site must have felt at 33.6Kb. It must have been downright painful.

There is still a lot of work to be done. I have to refine and pare down the CSS and continue the XHTML transition to the last pages. Optimize about 2200 images and improve the textual content. (Well, I will not be doing all that but enough of it as the rest of the hard working people in this small company are busy with day to day operations, phone sales, shows, etc…)

Now if I could only get the Google results to show and get rid of the “Supplemental Results” thing at Google. I am trying to be patient…