A few months back, I posted the saga of how I helped a client finally escape from Google Supplemental. Given the positive response to that article and some great follow-up questions, I closely tracked some relevant Google data over the four months since and thought I’d share some of what I learned.
April 22nd was “E-Day” (Escape Day). Weekly Google searches grew from a low point of 1,866 the week before E-Day to a high of 6,732 last week (a 361% increase). Before the complaints start coming, I’m not suggesting that this growth was entirely due to getting out of supplemental. Many of the SEO improvements that resulted in our escape were also generally positive, and we’ve been rewarded for them. The main point is that relatively rapid gains are possible (I’m sure many of you can demonstrate similar or even more impressive numbers).
One of the problems with my client’s site, SEO-wise, came down to massive content duplication (mostly due to being a large, database-driven site). Prior to E-Day, we had as many as 30,000 pages listed across the Google indexes; today, that number is closer to 5,000. While most people obsess about getting more pages into the Google indexes, there’s a compelling case that much of our success came from helping Google to clean out and focus its index of our site.
Of course, many people suffer from problems with Google successfully spidering their site, in which case it’s natural to want to increase your overall number of indexed pages. Past a point, though, when duplication starts to occur, you not only face potentially diminishing returns but the very real possibility of indirect penalties. As always, quality trumps quantity.
