With Google’s most recent update, one of the results has been a great number of pages being dropped to the supplemental index. What this means is that your page will show up after the main results for important keywords. In my case I was ranking on page 30 for keywords that I used to rank for on the first page.
In my post from April 11th (Is Google’s New Algorithm Update Impacting Your Site?) I discussed the importance of changing your keyword density to make your pages seem less spammy and improve your results. This greatly improved my site results and I have since expanded it to most of the articles on my site.
On the weekend I did something else that helped drive even more traffic – I created deep internal backlinks.
Google will also put your pages into the supplemental index if the pages do not have any links or Page Rank. The best way to get Page Rank is to have outside pages link to you but this takes time and is part of a long term SEO campaign. A quick fix is to make sure that your own pages deep link properly. This is especially important if you have a large site. On my site we made sure that each page had a link somewhere on the site but many of them were not being picked up by Google.
On Sunday I decided to try something new. I increased the number of backlinks internally and made sure that each internal page was linked at least three times from another page on my site. This made sure that the pages would be picked up. I then created a Google Sitemap and submitted it to Google.
The result? Traffic was up 35% on Monday compared to the Monday from last week and it continued yesterday and today as well. As more of the pages get picked up I am looking forward to an even greater traffic surge.
Even if you do not have a very large site, if you are finding that your main page is getting picked up but your deeper pages are put in supplemental, make sure to have those deeper pages linked multiple times from other pages on your site so they can get properly indexed.
Evan Carmichael
