Escaping Google's Supplemental Dead Zone

Recently throughout the blogosphere, a discussion has begun to gain steam about how exactly Google's supplemental results are determined, and what steps webmasters can take in order to rescue these left-for-dead pages and return them to the main index. In what can seem like a black hole of search results, Google's supplemental index seems to be growing at a steady, almost ominous rate. As the company refines how it ranks and indexes pages, those left behind the curb are surprisingly finding themselves relegated to the "dead zone" of search. What is a Supplemental Result? According to There doesn't seem to be a big mystery here. These types of improvements are common when it comes to SEO, and you would be hard pressed to find anyone who is knowledgeable about search that didn't already understand the importance of these fundamental concepts. Vanessa Fox, however, lets us in on a Search Engine Roundtable breaks down Vanessa's suggestion: In summary, by adding a meta description tag, a unique one, for each page, Google will use that information as extra criteria to determine the uniqueness of the page. That is how I understand it. Otherwise, Google will use the top text of your page's content, and that can potentially be your top navigation or worse. This comes in handy for conducting site: command searches with no keyword specific data given after the site command. That's a great start to the process, but what other techniques can webmasters employ to avoid being sucked into the dead zone? Joe Whyte Google Success blog adds: •   Rewrite your page title and description tags so that they are descriptive and relevant to your site, taking care that they are not too long or contain repetitive keywords. •   You may need to rewrite your PHP code for e-commerce websites using mod-rewrite to simplify the cryptic URLs and also add unique meta tags to each page. Hmm, maybe there's something to this meta tag thing after all, as this is the second mention of the importance of having unique tags on each and every page. I guess it really is the "little things" that make all the difference. Of course, don't tell that to Jason Calacanis, he still Stephen King; I swear I'm not ripping you off. Add to Del.icio.us | Digg | Reddit | Furl Joe is a staff writer for latest ebusiness news