Google Supplemental Cache and its Impact on your Blog

Google’s Supplemental Cache is an area where it dumps pages which it thinks as duplicates. This can hamper your page listing in Google quite significantly if you don’t take care of it.

If you’re running a blog, you just won’t realize that each post that you write can be classified as a duplicate. How you ask? Just think of the numerous ways in which the same post can be accessed from your blog:

• You can access it directly from its page where you posted it
• You can access it via the RSS/Atom Feed for your blog
• You can access it via the Archives
• You can access it via the Category pages

Now, how can you convince Google that all of them are actually pointing to just one source rather than being classified as a “duplicate page”?

As part of improving SEO for this blog, I noticed that mid-last month I had over 100 pages from the BlogSailor network dumped into Google’s Supplemental Cache. After doing a bit of searching around, I read a very well written article titled Blog SEO: Get Your Blog out of the Supplemental Index which gave me some good pointers.

I implemented both the solutions, i.e., updated the robots.txt file to ensure that the search engine spiders don’t pick up potential sources of classifying content as duplicates. Also, I modified the header template of this theme to not allow indexing of pages which are not “single post” pages.

It’s been about 2wks now, and I’m noticing some pages dropping off the supplemental cache now. As of writing this post, there are 80 posts in the supplemental cache.

Whether this will help improve traffic to this blog or not, time will tell.

Some other good articles on this topic:

• Get Your Blog Out of the Google Supplemental Index
  
• Google’s Supplemental Results