My Love to Google

So I will tell you the truth: I was and I'm still a big fan of Google. I like the story behind this company and frankly, is one of the most spectacular rising of a business in the last 20 years or so.

Most of the people knows Google as the "search engine" company. But over the years they succeed to come up with other powerful brand names such as AdWords, AdSense, Blogger or GMail, just to name only a few.

Sergey Brin and Larry Page did a great job with Google. They expend this business over the American borders, embracing now the whole word.

Like someone from BBC said, "The founders of the Google are the type of young men most parents would dream of their daughters bringing home. And far from simply because they will both be billionaires following a stock market flotation of Google."

They both happen to be geniuses with computers -- they met at Stanford University in the mid-1990's, where they were doing doctorates in computer sciences. First, they develop a new system type of search engine from their college dormitory.

The system was called BackRub. After changing its name to Google they dropped out of college and the rest is history. On 7 September 1998 Google was commercially launched from a friend's garage.

As Larry explained in an interview: "We have a mantra: 'Don't be evil', which is to do the best things we know how for our users, for our customers, for everyone. So I think if we were known for that, it would be a wonderful thing."

So, in the Web 2.0 era, Google is trying to become bigger and bigger... and I'm curious what, and when it will stop them. But two recent actions makes me rethink about my love to Google.

The first action -- and the most painful! -- was when Google search engine send my entire newsletter section (and couple of other pages) from my main web site into supplemental results!

The second action was connected with the GMail.

But today I will tell you the story of me and supplemental results...

Someone said once: "They've been called 'the Kiss of Death', 'Google Hell', and 'Screwed Pages' (Ok, I just made those up), but in any case, supplemental results is not where you want your pages to be if you expect traffic from Google."

Right! -- supplemental results are the latest nightmare for a lot of webmasters and e-business owners. In case you don't know what is this, let’s see Google’s official definition:

"A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank."

Is this too complicated for you? Let me translate -- Google throw away pages into supplemental results because:

1. You have duplicate content -- take someone else content on your pages

2. You have NO content -- you create pages with no or very poor content (200-250 words per page).

3. You have orphaned web pages on your site -- pages that no one links to, including yourself.

4. Identical title/description -- this is the easiest way to create supplemental pages.

5. Cannonical problems -- read Internet Marketing Profits Newsletter, issue 65 for more information.

Do you have web pages into supplemental results? An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google's supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com:

site:www.domain.com ***

The big question is: how to get out of Google's supplemental results?

1 -- Make sure that your web pages don't contain any spam elements and that you don't use any spam techniques to promote your web site.

2 -- Remove duplicate content. (if you don't want to delete, install META ROBOTS=NOINDEX to prevent Google from indexing them)

3 -- Keep up a clean HTML code -- if possible don't use web page URLs that contain question marks or symbols.

4 -- If you have a page which needs more link popularity, point link popularity to that section instead of trying to point more at your home page.

5 -- Always use unique TITLE/META description tags to create unique SERP listings.

6 -- Get more quality relevant inbound links.

To come back to my story, I became really mad when Google send couple of my articles into the 'the Kiss of Death'. Now that was stupid! A quick search on G will reveal that one of my article was published in 1,000+ other pages. Pages on different sites, on different C-class hosting accounts... and pages related or not to my original content.

And from all those pages, Google choose to send MY article, from my site, into the supplemental results. Hey big G, you supplemental algorithms stinks! And you are evil here...

Now face it -- when you make an article available to the public and encourage people to post it on their pages, you cannot control pretty much where your content will land...

What I'm telling you now was happening 6 months ago! Couple of days ago a made a new search and I found that G start to love me again. Almost 50% of my newsletter section is out of the supplemental results. Well, these are good news.What I did to get out -- nothing. Really! I let Google to judge my pages, being confident that my content was the authority.

In my next post I will tell you something that nowone has the courage to admit: the hidden traps behind the way you promote your site using articles.

Stay tune folks...

Tags: SEO, search engine optimization, Google, search engines, profits, internet, business, money, marketing