Getting out of the supplemental index

Back in late summer I reevaluated the linking strategy between my websites. Up until then I'd used my main site to feed link juice into my newer sites - softwarelode and so on. I decided this was a bad thing to keep on doing, since my original intention was to feed link juice back into my main money-earning site and not do things the other way around.

It was interesting though to see how well sites like softwarelode responded to getting a few links from my main site. Basically within 3 weeks softwarelode started getting a few hundred visitors a day even though it was a new site. Predictably, when I removed the links the visitor numbers began to fall but at a much slower pace than the visitor numbers grew in the first place. Rather than the 3 weeks or so for the visitor numbers to peak, it took 2 to 3 months for the visitor numbers to fall away. During those 3 months, Google did some mini toolbar PageRank exports and some of the inner pages of softwarelode started showing PRs of 2 or 3. By early December though all pages apart from the homepage were showing PR N/A and visitor numbers were 20% of the peak.

As the visitors fell away, more of the softwarelode pages were falling into Google's supplemental index. When a page is in the supplemental index it's not going to turn up in SERPS execept for very specific/ obscure search phrases. The supplemental index is purgatory for web pages. I had a look around the web to see what advice I could find. As to be expected the advice was that old chestnut - build backlinks. So, before Christmas I did a spurt of backlink building and I'm pleased to say that since the New Year visitors are returning to softwarelode and the Adsense income is beginning to climb again. Since yesterday (5th Jan), an extra 350 pages are marked as being in the main index. I know of similar sites to softwarelode with about 2500 pages in the main index that make a decent amount of Adsense income (few hundred dollars a month) so hopefully I'm on target to making softwarelode an earning website by the middle of 2009.

Google PageRank - Second Update

I'd been confused by the visible Pagerank of this blog as shown on the Google toolbar. After the last export of rank values at the end of July this blog had still not been assigned a rank value by Google and was still showing PR N/A. However today - Aug 23rd - the rank is showing as PR 3! This is great news and much more in line with what I was expecting. I'd been doing a mixture of different types of link-building and had also been doing directory submissions using SliQ Submitter, my directory submission software. This now looks as though it has paid off - at least in terms of PR - and ties up with the increase in the number of visitors to the blog over the past 4 weeks.

4 Tips for Making the Most of a Hyperlink

When getting a link to one of your websites you need to make the most of the link - not all links are equal. Here are my 4 tips for getting the most benefit from a link in terms of SEO:

Place the link on a page with higher PageRank

This means the link will have more PageRank to pass to you and will hopefully help push you up the ranking in search results.

Try to place the link on a page with only a small number of other links

When passing PageRank to other pages, the rank of a page is divided up between all the outgoing links on the page. If there are a lot of links on a page, the benefit passed by each one is reduced.

Place the link on a page on a similar topic to your own

For example a link from a page talking about shoes to one with a topic of finance is probably worth less.

Make sure the link text reinforces your keywords

For example, if one of your keywords is "Greek Holidays", make this the text associated with the link using the href element.

What is Google Pagerank?

Put simply, it's Google's measure of the importance of a web page or put another way, a measure of how likely you are to find a web page by randomly clicking on hyperlinks online. Google gives a web page a PageRank value between 0 and 10 with 0 meaning least important and 10 meaning more important.

This is the Google definition of PageRank:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Basically having more hyperlinks makes a page more important in Google's eyes. Incoming links from important pages count for more than links from less important pages. In a simple sense, if two web pages contain the words "Red Bananas" and a user searches for Red Bananas on Google, the page with the higher rank will appear first in the search results.

However, things are not quite this simple. If things were this simple, there would web pages stuffed with multiple links to other pages in an attempt to improve placings in search
results on Google.

Apart from Google itself, no-one knows how PageRank is calculated. Google now say that their ranking algorithms are more sophistacted than in years past and the content of pages is now more important than previously. However Google still assign and publish pageranks for websites 3 or 4 times a year so Pagerank must still have some relevance.

These factors are likely to affect the importance or weight passed by a hyperlink.
Multiple links from one page are devalued, i.e. the second link probably counts for less than the first link.

• Site-wide links are devalued, e.g. a link from every page in a 10 page website probably counts for less than links from 10 pageson separate websites.
• Reciprocal links are devalued. Many people now consider these worthless. This gets around the mutual voting scenario.
• A link from a page containing unrelated content counts for less, e.g. a link from a page talking about holidays to a page talking about nuclear physics, counts for less than a link from a page on another site talking about holidays.
• A link needs to say why it links to another page to give more credit, i.e. the link text needs to be appropriate to the topic of the page being linked.