Removing Supplementals in WordPress or Other Sites

I’ve had a few blogs hit supplementals lately even though they’ve got a pretty decent Inbound Link Authority. Generally whenever this happens I’ll query the site in question with Google’s site: operator to see if I can see anything out of the ordinary.

Well chances are that if you’re using wordpress & you’ve not set up your robots.txt correctly then you’ll be getting heaps of pages indexed that you don’t want.

What don’t you want indexed:

1. Your Plugins & Content Folder
2. Categories
3. Galleries & Images
4. Feeds & Trackbacks

What you DO want indexed:

1. Posts
2. Pages
3. Sitemap

Shoemoney had a similar problem a few weeks ago (And most people think he’s an SEO?). What happens in that in order to rank a page in the main index Google must attribute a minimum pagerank value to it. If it falls below the threshold it’ll hit supplemental. So you need to make sure that your site has a good distrubution of pagerank or authority. So if most of your links are hitting your homepage & you’re second level of navigation are your categories then you’re losing heaps of link popularity that should be going to your posts instead.

Ony my blogs I’ve implemented the following robots.txt with reasonable success (50% more pages indexed):

User-Agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /index.php
Disallow: /category/
Disallow: /feed/
Disallow: /feed

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-
Disallow: /trackback/

There is a good set of reasoning behind doing this on all of your sites. You should almost be telling the engines which pages you want to rank & which pages you don’t. Removing the pages that are worthless to the engines & only serve as a navigation between different parts of the site increase the relevance & internal linking power of other pages.

I have a Joomla content site that has more category pages than static pages. So I exlcluded all the category pages & my traffic has jumped from around 500 uniques/day to 1500 in about 8 days. Gotta love Everflux

Remember if you have unique content on your blog & you’re still suffering from Supplementals you need to get some links to your main page & internals, never stop this cycle of linkbuilding or linkbaiting.

I’ve received about 4 or 5 reviews about Earners Blog that I asked for last week, I’m still looking for a lot more. So keep em coming. There’s $25 & an SEO Audit in it for you.

I also think that the DNS is still settling after the switch to the new hosting, so some of you may still be seeing & commenting on the old version of the site. I’ll try to get the databases synced so we don’t lose some of the comments

In other news check out Eli’s new post about Power Indexing sites with a large number of pages.