John K Mitchell's Misc Blog

It's been a hectic few weeks with clients suddenly wanting changes to their sites and a possible large building project at the school.

Then I was contacted by a client who wanted to know why he could not find his website any longer in Google. He was understandably concerned as he feels that much of his traffic and enquiries comes from Google searches. There had been no changes to his site and it had previously been doing fairly well for specific searches.

I looked at Google and used the site: command to see how many pages were listed, it seems that they were all there but for some reason only the home page and one other were in the main index, all the others were marked as supplemental. Looking at the cache date for the supplemental they all seemed to be marked as the middle of May this year

This warranted more investigation and from various forums it seems that the main reasons for pages going into the supplemental index is that they are duplicates of other pages, and empty or have no links to them (although how a page can be found if there are no links to it I'm not sure). I even came across http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/gone-supplemental/ which seems to show that there are many people out there with the same problem...

Now all I have to do is to try and work out how to solve it, the Googlebot spider still goes around this client's site, nothing has changed and the site has many links from other sites including to internal pages, the html validates correctly... Maybe the site needs a bit of a refresh as it's not been touched for over a year (after all, there is only so many things you can say about a local cleaning company). Of course, if it is just that it needs some updates to the pages it makes me wonder about sites with research articles - will they also drop out of the main index on Google ?