Google's Supplemental Index - Reduce Labels or Sink!

When you add your blog to Google it sends it's spiders to index your blog. The spiders index all the pages in your blog and arrange them into a Main Index and a Supplemental Index. You should take all steps possible to prevent your pages from landing into the Supplemental Index.............

When people search using Google it returns the results found in the Main Index. If it does not find any results there it turns to the Supplemental Index. When Google spiders crawl your blog whatever duplicate content they find is dumped into the Supplemental Index.



When you apply labels to your posts in the bottom frame of the post editor when creating a post or on the posts list page you are actually creating duplicate content. For example the following links on a New Blogger blog will bring up the same content :

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com/YEAR/MONTH/POST_TITLE_A

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com//search/label/LabelA

http://YOURBLOGNAME.blogspot.com//search/label/LabelB

when the Labels A and B are applied to the post : POST_TITLE_A. When Google crawls your blog the duplicate content pages are placed in the Supplemental Index. The more labels a post has the more content is duplicated in the blog.



The Official Google Blog has this to say about duplicate content :

Understand your CMS: Make sure you're familiar with how content is displayed on your Web site, particularly if it includes a blog, a forum, or related system that often shows the same content in multiple formats.

If most of your site is in Google's Supplemental Index you may find your income and traffic dropping sharply. To find out how much of your site/blog is in the Supplemental Index type this in Google's Search Box :

site:www.yoursite.com *** -sjpked

OR

site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf

Replace 'www.yoursite.com' with your blog URL/link and press Enter on Keyboard. To find the total nuber of pages indexed enter this in Google's search box :

site:www.yoursite.com

Again replace 'www.yoursite.com' with your blog URL/link and press Enter on Keyboard. You will get a list of your pages and those in the Supplemental Index will have that label. See picture below :


In the above picture one of my label pages is in the Supplemental Results. You will also see your feed pages in the supplemental results.

To find the percentage of pages in the Supplemental Index :

site:www.yoursite.com *** -sjpked
----------------------------------------------- * 100%
site:www.yoursite.com


I did some research on this and found that blogs having labels were having this percentage ranging from 70 to 80%. Blogs with classic templates not using labels were having a very low percentage. You can check this put for yourself. If you find an old blog without labels calculate the percentage and you will see it is low.



This blog also has a higher percentage which I will aim to reduce by deleting unnecessary labels and by adding only one or two labels to each post in the future. Applying a label can get you traffic but too many labels will land your blog in the Supplemental Index.

HOW TO DELETE LABELS

To delete a label login to the Dashboard and click on Posts. The Posts list page will open. Check the box of the post which has the label you want to delete. Then click the down arrow at the top next to 'Label Actions'. Scroll down in the drop down list till you come to Remove Labels heading. Then click on the label you wish to remove. See picture below :



Note that you have to check the box of the post which contains that label otherwise that label will not appear in the drop down list.