Getting out of Google Hell
There have been a flurry of articles lately about the dreaded Google Hell — AKA the Google Supplemental Index. The consensus seems to be that if the page has broken some rule of SEO then it ends up there. And sometimes the whole site ends up there if too many pages have broken one of the SEO rules. According to an article on Jim Boykin’s Blog the three biggies are:
- Duplicate Content
- No Content
- Orphaned Web Pages
Jim gives the solutions to these as this:
- If you stole content - change it.
- If there’s no content - add some.
- If it’s orphaned - link to it.
Then he goes on to say that you need to submit a google sitemap. The problem Jim doesn’t point out is that there is more than one way for duplicate content to show up on a site, and sometimes the sitemap is the way to find what’s going wrong in the first place.
Let me give you an example of this. The script I use for the WebGeek Resources Directory has a feature as part of the script where a user can sort the list of links on any page by pagerank or alphabetically. If you are on a page that is by default sorted alphabetically and you click the link for alphabetical sort you end up at a page with the EXACT SAME CONTENT as the page you were on, only the url has a couple extra characters attached to the end to represent the type of sort you chose. This is not something a human would do, but spiders could conceivably follow the link and, because they’re looking at a different url but a page with the same content, the spider will label these pages as duplicate content.
This is not the only web ap script that has this type of feature, and I’m sure there are others which do similar things that could screw the hell out of your SEO effort. So, what’s a webgeek to do? Sometimes it can be dealt with in the template, with a simple removal of the line of code that generates that bit in the template, but sometimes not. And if it’s a useful feature that you want to continue to offer your visitors then that’s not the way to deal with it. If you can’t remove it from the template, then you could conceivably hack the script’s core, only to have a security upgrade come along and trash your efforts. Or, if you’re smart, you could have a good sitemap generating script which has provisions to filter these warped urls out. Since the sitemap is, in essence, the content you’re telling the spiders you WANT them to spider, this is the way to tell them that the other urls to get to that content are not “worthy”.
So if you use any sort of dynamic scripting, it’s important in your SEO effort to analyse the sitemap that your Sitemap Generator Script is creating and figure out if the Web Ap you’re using to create your site is accidentally screwing up your SEO efforts. Then you need to decide which of the above approaches is the right way to deal with it. If you don’t have a sitemap, you need to get a script to run one to do this diagnosis. Why? Because the sitemap generator uses a similar sort of spider to what the search engines use, though the sitemap generator’s spiders are quite a bit more stripped down. The value is in seeing your site the way a spider does. It then becomes easy to diagnose your site’s illness and develop a cure in the form of some filters.
Technorati Tags: SEO, Dynamic Scripts and Duplicate Content, Google Supplementary Index, Google Hell
