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I read this article by John Chow on reducing the number of pages in Google’s Supplemental Index and checked out the same for my blog and found that it had more than 700 pages in Google’s Supplemental Index and decided that I would do something about it. I had earlier created a robots.txt based on Everton’s and like him, I also experienced a steep increase in traffic. When a further change guaranteed some more increase in traffic, I was more than happy to try it out.

Here is the SEO for Firefox stats for my blog. This was taken yesterday and there has been absolutely no change since May 24th (That’s when I had changed the robots.txt file).

Based on John Chow’s robots.txt I modified mine. You can see it here. That is when trouble started. My traffic started going down. Drastically. I tried to reason out why it happened. My blogging pattern hadn’t changed. Apart from the robots.txt, I couldn’t find any other difference. When the drop went down by 60%, I reverted back to my old robots.txt (day before yesterday) and immediately I began to see a slight increase in the number of hits. I also checked out SEO for Firefox for John Chow which shows that his blog has crossed more than 2000 pages in Google’s Supplemental Index. Check out the screenshot below.

This experiment doesn’t seem to have helped John Chow. I’m not sure if he noticed any spike in traffic. It definitely has not helped me in any way. However, Nathan at Not So Boring Life seems to have had an increase of 20% in Search Engine traffic.

Below is an excerpt of my conversation with an ex-colleague who has some experience in SEO

me: then how do i reduce the suplementary indexing?

Anil: Actually once the page rank of ur blog increases, all the pages which are in supplementary index of search engines will come in to main indexing…. no need to worry abt it…. but remove all “disallows” in the code…this will cause more pain than supplementary indexing..

I’m not sure how correct this is, but that’s exactly what I did by going back to my earlier robots.txt. Can someone help me out here? These questions have been bothering me for quite some time now.

1. What went wrong with this experiment?
2. Why did I lose more than 60% of my traffic?
3. Why has the number of pages in Google’s Supplemental Index for John Chow increased while it should have decreased?
4. How did it work for Nathan and not for me?

Any answers??

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Microsoft adCenter is turning one year old this month but looks like it has failed to achieve anything great except better monetization than their previous system, Overture (which was later bought by Yahoo!). Well, the problem is not with adCenter but with their search engine, Live Search.

To add to their woes, they overbilled customers because of a bug and advertisers were upset when Microsoft moved their ads outside the search engine to its MSN Web sites. Still others say adCenter’s software, while indeed sophisticated, is slow and unreliable. You can find more complaints about adCenter here.

adCenter’s ad revenue soared by 23 percent to $456 million for the quarter ended March 31, 2007. The business had $623 million in overall revenue, up from $562 million for the same period the previous year, but it showed an operating loss of $200 million, compared with a loss of $24 million a year ago.

Via: The Seattle Times

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I had put up a post earlier on the Top 10 SEO Ranking Factors based on the Search Engine Ranking Factors guide Version Two by SEOmoz. Now Carsten of Search Engine Journal has brought out a simplified version of the much more extensive version based on the opinions of the 37 experts, who are considered leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization.

The simplified version will hopefully catch the eyes of the not so tech savvy people as it is very simple to understand and alongwith a little bit of research on SEO, they would be much better off than what they were before reading Carsten’s version.

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SEOmoz have released Version Two of their Search Engine Ranking Factors guide. V2 is the result of the collective wisdom 37 leaders in the world of Organic Search Engine Optimization. The contributers rated each factor on a scale of 5.

Top 10 positive factors were:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity of Site
3. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
4. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
5. Age of Site
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

Top 5 negative factors were:

1. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
2. Content Very Similar or Duplicate of Existing Content in the Index
3. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
4. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages

And the most controversial factors were:

1. Manual Authority/Weight Given to Site by Google
2. Relevance of Site’s Primary Subject Matter to Query
3. Participation in Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
4. Duplicate Title/Meta Tags on Many Pages
5. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
6. Quality of the Document Content (as measured algorithmically)
7. Domain Extension of Linking Site (edu, gov, com, ca, co.uk, etc)
8. Server is Often Inaccessible to Bots
9. External Links to Low Quality/Spam Sites
10. TLD Extension of Site (edu, gov, us, ca, com, etc)

The complete SEOmoz report can be read here and it is highly recommended. For those who also want to have a look at the Version 1 made in the year 2005, you can find it here.

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