Getting Smaller Sites Out of the Supplemental Index

There’s been a few posts by other SEO’s about how to get your site out of the Supplemental index. Andy Hagan’s has a good post on how to get out of the supplementals where he lists 5 steps (unique title tags, unique meta descriptions, plenty of unique content, get more trusted links, and get links to the internal pages).  The most tedious part of course is usually getting inbound links to those internal pages.  For smaller sites,  you can actually get yourself out of the supplemental index just by having a better site navigation that allows the spiders to crawl to those pages and without having to spend a bunch of time link building. Most times the pages that are sent to supplemental hell are pages that don’t have enough links to them or are duplicate content pages. If the pages that are supplemental are some of the more important pages in the site, you may want to use sitewide links in the footer of the site. This will of course provide more links to those pages (yes, your own site links count) and also tell the search engine which are the most important pages of your site. If you have a larger site, obviously you can’t do this but you can create multiple site map pages to provide additional links to those pages. As long as your site is being crawled on a regular basis (you do have to have some good inbound links to your site) then eventually you will get those pages out of the supplemental index.