Jill:

I was wondering if you, or anyone you know of, are noticing an increase in the amount of sites being in supplemental results? I'm not an SEO expert, don't get me wrong, but as a novice I have seen more of this in the last month than in the previous year. People who aren't clients are calling at an ever-increasing rate and saying their sites are not found. Today I found that one of our client sites is mostly in supplemental results and I'm at a total loss. The site's been up about 3 months, all the content is original and not duplicated, we never participate in any SEO tactics that could even be considered unethical -- so I just can't explain it. What's more is that this is the second such site to have this occur this month. Any ideas what this could be? Is it some new and obscure Google update that I haven't heard about?

Dan K.

Jill's Response

Hi Dan,

People have been reporting this phenomenon ever since Google rolled out its "Big Daddy" update a few months ago. The update has never really stopped completely, and many URLs were placed into the supplemental results section for a while. It's generally only temporary, however. The good news is that as long as your content isn't the same as elsewhere on your site, being in the supplemental results at this time is really more of a glitch on Google's end than anything you need to worry about.

You do want to be sure, however, that each bit of content on your site is reachable via only one specific URL. If it's reachable by other forms of the URL, you'll want to be sure to exclude those variations via the robots.txt exclusion file on your server.

Hope this helps!

Jill

Discuss this article in the Small Business Ideas forum.