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04.10.07
Pull Your Site Out Of The Supplemental Index
 By Richard Hearne
I met Krishna De in Cork last month. She gave a fantastic presentation on marketing and leveraging the Internet to achieve your business goals.
In fact, without prejudice to any of the other speakers, I found that Krishna's topic area was of the most interest to me. Krishna also availed of my offer for a free site review. So without further ado…
KrishnaDe.com
I have to say I have always admired Krishna's website. It is just well polished from the get-go. The homepage just speaks ‘professionalism' to me.
If I were to find any fault it would be with the footer - I can't easily discern between text and links. But that would just be nit-picking.
More than meets the eye
It was only when I sent in a spider that the true size of Krishna's site became apparent. I knew that her blog has been on-line for a number of years and so expected the blog to be quite extensive. But I hadn't expected this:
Crawler 1: 2,306 internal pages
Crawler 2: 2,604 pages (some external)
A look at Google's index shows that Krishna's site has a high number of pages in the supplemental index:
Pages Indexed: 1,330
Pages Supplemental: 964
That's a particularly high proportion of supplemental:indexed pages, and to me this is the most pressing issue for Krishna.
A robots eye view
Here's Krishna's robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /_mm/
Disallow: /_notes/
Disallow: /_baks/
Disallow: /MMWIP/
Disallow: /audio-for/
Disallow: /private/
Disallow: /onlinebrand/
User-agent: googlebot
Disallow: *.csi
When I look at some of the files that have made their way into the supplemental index I can see immediately that many should not be indexed in the first place.
HOLD PRESS - I've just noticed that Krishna's site has been hacked:
Those links at the top of the page shouldn't be there. That's taken from Google's cached version of the page. Here's the original page. This type of hacking is normally carried out by altering the .htaccess file to cloak your pages for GoogleBot. Normal users are shown the second page, while Google sees the page with the links.
I've seen this hack a lot recently. The best medicine is to make sure that your software is up-to-date. There have been issues with Wordpress, and that's why the Wordpress guys are very much on the ball with updates. You have to carefully check your server to see what else has been left around. The first file I would check is .htaccess, although in this case I have a feeling there may be a bit more going on.
Continue reading this article.
About the Author:
Richard Hearne is the founder of Red Cardinal, a dedicated search marketing consultancy. A frequent contributor to Google's Webmaster Group, Richard regularly advises clients on Internet marketing strategy and Search Engine optimisation campaigns. Richard's thoughts and research can be found on his search marketing blog. |
