You’ve been working hard on your site, posting new content regularly, playing by the rules, being a good netizen and all that good stuff. One day you decide to check and see how you are doing in Google’s index. So you type in site:yoursite.com to see how many pages have been indexed.

Oh the horror!

A large portion of your pages are listed with the phrase “Supplemental Result” next to them.

Supplemental results are just that—supplemental. Provided when the primary variants aren’t good enough, or when someone who is starving consumes all the other results and still wants more. This means that your pages aren’t going to have the optimal traffic generating characteristics that you’d hoped for.

Two Possibilities with Supplemental Results

Take a deep breath—supplemental results aren’t the end of the world. There are two main situations where supplemental results come into play:

1. Your pages are new, and Google isn’t sure about them just yet. They are in supplemental results for a while until Google integrates them into the main search index. You just have to wait for a while (2 months should be enough). This happened to over 100 of DiamondLime’s pages after I moved my site and was first indexed at the new domain name.
2. Google doesn’t like your pages as much as the alternatives. This is tougher than simply having to wait like in case #1, but again, not the end of the world. There are things you can do to get your pages to move into the main index.

Page Rehab - Getting Pages out of Supplemental Results

There are things you can do to get your pages out of supplemental results. The central point is that you have to do things that will make your pages better (or at least seem better) than the alternatives. Here is a list of things you can do to get a page out of the supplemental results, starting with the most effective:

1. Get links from other sites to the page that needs to move out of supplemental results
2. Link to the page from other pages on your site
3. Add useful content
4. Improve your on-page SEO elements.

Get Links from Other Sites

The most powerful factor for moving your site’s pages out of supplemental results is to have other web sites link directly to your pages. This deep linking tells Google that someone values your content enough to link to it, and that immediately puts you up over all the resources that aren’t linked to from external sites.

Link to the Page from Your Site

If you link to your struggling page from many varied locations on your web site, you are telling Google (and other search engines) that out of the pages on your site, you deem this particular page to be important. This is almost as effective as getting an external link. Don’t overdo it, though, or you may shake the balance of your site’s SEO up too much.

Add Useful Content

Adding to and modifying the content on your struggling page indicates to search engines that you are trying to improve the page and that this particular resource is up to date.

Improve On-page SEO Factors

Improving your page’s SEO for on-page elements (headers, titles, etc.) is like waxing your car—it’s the same old car, but it looks like it’s worth more.

Once you’ve done what you can, wait. It can take quite a while. SEO requires patience. If, though, after 6 months and two passes at improving your page, you don’t have rankings, it may be time to focus on another page targeting that term.

Best of luck getting out of the supplemental results! It is possible, I did it—as of this writing, not one of the pages indexed on my site is a supplemental result.

The page ranks on my site have been “inverted” for quite a while and only just now have they begun to shift towards what’s more normal.

Inverted Page Rank? What’s an Inverted Page Rank?

A normal web site usually has page rank concentrated on the home page, followed by the main category pages, and finally the normal content pages. So your site may have a page rank of 4 on the home page, 3 on each of the category pages, and from 2 to 0 on content pages.

DiamondLime.com had (what I consider) a rare case of page rank distribution—it was almost totally inverted from the normal hierarchy in the paragraph above. The home page had a page rank of 2, category pages had a page rank of 3, articles had page ranks anywhere from 4 to 0, and the site map had a page rank of 5!

How Did My Page Rank Get Turned Upside Down?

I’m not entirely sure how my page rank got to be so strange, but here are a few of my theories:

• Heavy Deep Linking

  My site has been linked to in an unordinary fashion—I have a few pages and blog posts that are far more popular and linked to than most of my main pages. More people link to my post on ChaCha, The BYU Blog and Web Site Directory, or The Lime Blog than the home page. All these links’ page rank is getting poured into my site further down in my navigation hierarchy.

• Page Rank Bleeding

  One page that should have had a high page rank and didn’t was my blog. I think that this is because there were many links on my blog page to other sites that were bleeding page rank like mad.

• Links Per Page

  The Lime Blog and the home page of DiamondLime.com both had many, many links to other pages, effectively distributing all of their page rank away from themselves.

How Can I Un-Invert Page Ranks?

I did a few things that have helped even my page rank out. To fix the deep linking that was turning my page rank upside down, I tried (within reason) to make sure those pages that were heavily linked to also linked to many other pages to spread their page rank around. I changed how my page rank bleeding happened by reducing the number of off-site links that were on main pages and shifting these links to a links page (I still want to link to my friends and to valuable resources, so I couldn’t just remove them. Moving these links helped make things more organized, too). Finally, I added a few links to emphasize pages that I wanted to give higher page rank to.

These efforts seem to have worked—instead of ranging from 0 to 5, my page ranks recently became 4 for all the main pages except the main page of my blog and 3 for most everything else. The lesson is that you can influence how your “Google Juice” or page rank is shared around, even if the bottle is upside down and making a sticky mess.

After the famous Million Dollar Home Page, lots of people have tried to come up with similar linking schemes to earn money and/or fame. Many of them are pathetic. Others are somewhat ingenious or even downright clever methods of free traffic generation.

One of the more creative linking ideas is from Tag A Cloud. No money changes hands—only links. Each visitor is allowed to sign up for one or more tags. These tags are short text descriptions that are added to the overall tag hierarchy. For each click your tag gets, you get a point. For each visitor that comes from your site to Tag a Cloud, you get two points. The more points you accumulate, the larger your tag becomes relative to the other tags on Tag A Cloud. You win by increasing traffic to your site. Tag a Cloud wins by getting more traffic and huge inbound link power. What Tag a Cloud plans to do with all this Google Juice is yet to be seen.

So head on over to Tag a Cloud and see if you can’t get some good free traffic generation going. I’d appreciate a little click love below:

An important part of evaluating a site is when (or if) a site was crawled (visited) by a search engine spider.

For example, if you are thinking of buying a site or taking a company on as a client, it’s important to know if the site has any chance of getting free, natural traffic from search engines. If the site has never been indexed or is so rarely visited that new content would take months to be indexed, then you may want to reconsider

Determine Last Spider Visit

To determine the most recent spider visit for a site, simply type “site:yoursitename.com” into the search box of the search engine you are testing. Most search engines, including Google, Yahoo, and MSN, support this command. The search engine will display a list of all of the pages that it is aware of on that site. Each listed page will usually have a link that says “Cached” next to it. Click on “Cached”. There will be an information bar at the top of your browser that will say when the page was cached (unfortunately, Yahoo doesn’t display these dates).

Sometimes you will see the date each page was cached listed on the search engine results page, making your job much easier. The pages with dates displayed are usually the most recently crawled pages and were visited in the last 1-3 days.

By looking at the cache dates of each page, you will be able to see when the most recent spider visit was and the extent of the indexing it did. I usually check my home page, blog, and other high-page-rank pages first—they get indexed far more frequently than the rest of my site.

Check Crawling Reach and Frequency

One of your site evaluation criteria should be an evaluation of when a site was last visited by a search engine spider. Using the site command and cached dates, you can get an idea of how well and how frequently a site is crawled by the search engine spiders.

When you are redesigning your web site, first take stock of the goals and functionality that you want your site to meet or have. When you know your goals and necessary functionality, you can then determine the structure of your site—the navigational structure, various site paths, and links between pages.

Think About Conversions

A conversion occurs when your site visitor takes one of the actions that you want him or her to take. These conversions, and the multiple steps (mini-conversions) that lead to them, are the whole purpose of your site. If you run an e-commerce site, the main goal is for your customers to add products to your cart and complete the entire checkout process. A forum wants users to sign up, read and make posts, and return frequently. Informational web sites want people to return and read or listen often. Some sites are designed to generate leads for salespeople.

You want to structure your site so that it is as easy and as desirable as possible for visitors to complete the desired actions—to be converted.

Think About Spiders

The easier you make it for a search engine spider to get around your site, the more pages it is going to find, index, and (hopefully) rank. If you make the link “tree” simple and easy to follow, you stand a better chance of pleasing a search engine spider.

Think About Confused People

No one is going to know your site as well as you do—click paths for actual visitors can make it seem like your visitors are drunk, lost, or just plain silly. Trust me, though, they usually (and hopefully) aren’t any of those things. They just won’t know your site very well from their initial visit. You need to make the structure or your site intuitive enough that your visitors can understand it quickly without hand-holding.

Another major problem I have seen as I have designed or redesigned web sites is that often the navigation structure is inconsistent. Inconsistency is worse than complexity. Imagine, you land on a site, click to go to a product description, click to the features page, and then want to go back to the product description. Now, though, instead of being first on the list of navigation links, it’s 4th and it’s called “product outline” or “product overview.” Huh? You will lose and confuse your visitors if navigation paths aren’t consistent.

My Basic Process

After designing many sites, I have a basic process that I follow for designing a site. Here are the main steps that I follow:

1. Define Main Areas

   Luckily, you’re not starting from scratch when you start to define the main areas of your site. In fact, there will usually be at least one area for each of the main functions of your site.

   For example, KindredLearning.com has five main functions that it’s supposed to have: store, newsletter, articles, company news, and general company information. After looking at all the different pages that we wanted to include on KindredLearning.com, we decided on six main areas: Four Year Plan (the main selling point for Kindred Learning’s entire business), Products, Newsletter, Articles, News/Updates, and About Us. We added only one area, and we did it in order to make certain educational materials on the site more prominent.

   These main areas make up the “main level” navigation of your site. Your visitors can see the main things they can do or learn about on the site in a glance from anywhere on the site.

2. Assign Pages to Areas

   The next step is to make a list of all of the pages that need to be on your site and then assign each page to one of the areas. Most of the time, it will be clear in which area a page belongs, although you will occasionally have a page that seems to belong in more than one area. It can be really tough to decide where to finally assign this page. You can make every page accessible from many places on the site, but you need to assign every page a “home.” These associations can be changed, but changes need to be made with GREAT care—changes to associations and navigation menus are the number one way to introduce navigational inconsistency into a site.

3. Set Up Levels

   Once you have all your pages assigned to the different areas, you’re ready to impose a little further structure on your site. Some pages will naturally belong to certain sub-areas or categories. You can group these pages together and then create a new “index” type of page to link to each of these pages. You can also link to pages right from the main area page. These groupings, indexes, and assignments create a hierarchy for your site, one which is hopefully clear, natural, and easy to follow.

I usually perform the task of structuring my site on a white board, a large piece of paper (the same way that Carolynn Duncan solves big problems), or an Excel spreadsheet. It usually ends up looking something like this:

Click to Enlarge

You can see the areas along the top (I really like tabbed navigation at the main level), the pages and indexes below them, and the sub pages below them. The hierarchy has worked out clearly and is usually no more than about three levels deep.

At this point, you’ve succeeded in determining the goals of your site, deciding on the functionality necessary to achieve these goals, and mapping the functions and information to a navigational wireframe.

Finally, go through the structure of your site and think about conversions, spiders, and confused people again. If your structure satisfies these needs, then you’re good to go.

I have recently seen the influence of Google’s Jagger update at work on DiamondLime.com. There were three steps that occurred with my site:

The Jagger Sequence

1. Traffic Changes

   The first thing I noticed was a shift in traffic patterns for my site. I saw a sharp increase in traffic for most of the important keyword phrases relevant to my site (which makes sense, since I have been adding content regularly) and a slight decrease for a few terms (which I have left stagnant).

2. Only Supplemental Results

   It was scary when I typed in site:diamondlime.com one day to find that only 3 of my pages weren’t supplemental results or eliminated altogether—my home page, the Lime Blog, and my business page. I suspected it was only the site command that was inaccurate, though, because my traffic didn’t hiccup. My pages were still being served in Google’s results pages.

3. Updated Listing

   After a week or so of being in supplemental results limbo, my entire site was re-spidered and listed in Google again. My reported page rank has been updated, too.

Weathering the Storm

It looks like DiamondLime.com managed to weather the Jagger Storm intact. The important things, like traffic and being ranked for keyword phrases, survived or even improved. I attribute this success to the fact that I have done my best to build a reputable, white-hat, recommendation-abiding web site.

A curious thing that happened to DiamondLime that isn’t likely to happen to other sites is that the reindexing of my site happened during the 1 hour period it took for me to upgrade my site! Consequently, the titles of my pages were scrambled before I could adjust them after I upgraded Wordpress last weekend. I have missing spaces between post titles and the name of my blog (”» 2006 » JulyThe Lime Blog”). Hopefully it won’t take Google until another major update to reindex my site and correct these goofy page titles.

ChaCha uses humans for search, but they’re no longer the only ones. Some search problems are a long way off from being solved, and rather than wait for technology to catch up, Google is using humans to label images for its image search.

Consensus Labeling

Google uses humans by making it an image-labeling game—you and a partner label the same image at the same time. You only earn points and move on to the next image when you and your partner give the image the same label.

I must admit, it is fun to try to label images quickly and see what kind of score you can get. At times, it is frustrating because you and your partner see the same image so differently. You can pass to the next image, and hopefully that will help you to keep earning more points. Google certainly benefits from having many, many images labeled quickly.

Labeling Issues

There are a few issues with the quick consensus labeling solution. One is quality—if you are hurrying, images usually end up labeled with one word. A cover of a book about “the darkness within” got labeled “red” instead of “depression,” “psychology,” or “emotional exploration.” Forcing a consensus also tends to limit the length and complexity of labels.

Another problem is difficult images. There are images that are abstract, hard to see, or complex and that would require more time to properly analyze. These images get passed over by humans in a hurry to agree with their labeling partner.

Human Solution

Even though there are problems, you have to admit that it is certainly more effective to use humans to label pictures than machines. Humans can evaluate the entire picture at once, make associations, and use emotions. “Holiday,” “barbecue,” “graduation,” and “play” are all labels that a machine would have an exceedingly difficult time in coming up with.

Duplicate Labels

So why doesn’t Google follow the tagging phenomenon? There are tons and tons of pictures already categorized, labeled, and even described on Flickr and other photo sharing sites. And a simple game doesn’t have much stickiness—there needs to be a stronger incentive to come back and label hundreds and thousands of pictures. It will be interesting to see how Google and others will solve the image problem, along with the other semantic, meta-data problems of the web.

DMOZ is another name for the Open Directory Project, the largest, free, human-edited directory on the web. It is constructed and maintained by volunteers from all over the globe who make submissions and edits to the listings. As the largest directory, it provides listings and results as a help or starting point for many search engines, including Google, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape, and others. Go to BruceClay.com to see a graph of how central DMOZ is to search engine results.

Google Draws Results From DMOZ

Google, like other search engines, often uses the listings and descriptions from the ODP in its results. These results and descriptions can have a powerful effect on how effective your site’s search engine results are. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell DMOZ and Google what to say about your site? To write a description that accurately describes your site and entices visitors to come?

How to Submit a Site to DMOZ:

Luckily, you can tell Google and DMOZ how to portray your site. DMOZ is edited by humans, and so to get a listing in the ODP, you need to make the humans there aware of your site (which, if your site is new or small, may not be very likely). There is a link on most DMOZ category pages for suggesting sites and descriptions for those sites. Official guidelines for the DMOZ URL suggestion tool are here.

1. Go to the category that you feel fits your site best
2. If available, click the “suggest url” link
3. Enter the web address of your site
4. Give your “elevator pitch,” the concise, accurate summary of your site that you want DMOZ to display (Make sure your description is objective and doesn’t sound promotional)

Chances are, if you make it easy for them, the editors will simply use the information you gave them and give your site a good DMOZ listing.

What to Do About a Bad DMOZ Listing:

Sometimes the editors don’t understand your site and give you a poor or incorrect listing. Sometimes your site changes and your listing needs updating. You can do one of two things about these problems:

1. Update your listing. You can update your listing by going to the category where your site is listed and clicking the “update listing” link. Make sure to clearly show the error, short coming, or change that needs to be made in your DMOZ listing.
2. Use the NOODP meta tag on your site. The NOODP meta tag allows you to ask search engines to override or ignore the ODP listing that your site has in favor of content found on the pages of your site. Matt Cutts’ blog entry shows you how to use the NOODP meta tag.

DMOZ provides what is, for the most part, a valuable service. There are allegations that the directory is flawed, spammed, or worthless, but the editors are only human. Besides, flawed, spammy, or worthless, the ODP still has a strong influence on the web and you have the tools to influence what they say about you or to avoid ill effects from potential DMOZ problems. Use DMOZ submissions as one more edge in your effort to improve your rankings and marketing message on the Internet.

At this point, I should put on a lab coat and shout, “It’s Alive! IT’S ALIVE! Hahahahaha!” Bringing stuff back from the dead will do that to you.

I’ve been working with some clients lately who have asked us to “bring back” some dead sites—sites that are not ranked for any terms in search engines and which get few visitors.

Learning Experiences

Two of these sites in particular were learning experiences. My coworkers at Sebo Marketing and I went through our typical site (re)building process—we made a list of keywords, we had a graphic designer come up with something contemporary and professional, we coded the site in standards-compliant code, we optimized our pages for search engines, and we provided plenty of what we like to call “spider food”—lots of pages with good link structure and content that spiders love.

And then we waited.

We’re still waiting, more than 6 months later.

External Links

One of the main weaknesses of these two sites is that our external linking campaigns were weak. They were the kind of sites that people wouldn’t mind visiting but weren’t likely to link to, even if you asked them nicely.

Spider Visit Frequency

Our biggest mistake by far was that we didn’t find out when search engine spiders visited the sites last. As it turns out, both sites had been dead and not visited by search engine spiders for over a year. The content hadn’t been updated and the sites had sucked for so long that the spiders haven’t been back and haven’t seen the wonderful redesign we did.

Let this be a lesson to all of you excited site renovators out there—if the site hasn’t been visited by a spider in a long time, and if an external linking campaign promises to be difficult, please proceed with caution, or at least a LOT of patience.

It may be better to start over on a new server (update the domain name to point at the new server) and get sandboxed by Google and then get out—six months in the sandbox is better than a year between spider visits!

I receive Marketing Vox’s Daily E-mail Newsletter—which is a great source of Internet marketing news—and I recently read this article: Search Marketers Wear Many Hats.

Search Marketers Wear Many Hats

I think it would be more correct to say “Internet marketers wear many hats.” Search engine marketing, paid search advertising, web site design, email marketing, etc., are all part of the broader Internet marketing category—they’re all methods for increasing traffic and sales online.

But lexical issues aside, I agree with this statement—all of the Internet marketers I know perform at least three of the functions listed in this article.

Is Wearing Many Hats Bad?

Well, yes and no.

Being spread among so many different responsibilities makes it more difficult to focus laser-like on any one thing at a time. It’s difficult to become a master of all the different tasks that are involved. It can be a pretty steep learning curve.

However, I think that it is possible to master all of the necessary skills. Scheduling, focus, and discipline can overcome the distraction factors.

I also think that wearing many hats is often part of the success of online campaigns—it allows for an over-arching, coordinated strategy.

Finally, I personally love the challenge and variety of having many different Internet marketing responsibilities.

What Hats Do You Wear?

So, what Internet marketing hat(s) do you wear?

Out of those listed in the Vox article, I wear, or have worn, the following hats: search engine optimization, paid search advertising, web design, email advertising, marketing communications, market research, and competitive intelligence.