The site is large with a huge gallery of pictures, so a lot of the site had duplicate or no written content, especially on deeper pages. Around the time I began having ranking problems a lot of these pages were suddenly listed as supplemental. I changed the content on hundreds of pages and submitted an XML site map to Google, but it's been a year and they're still mostly supplemental.
Are my supplemental internal pages responsible for my homepage's drop in rankings? If so, what can I do about it?
Answer: Internal pages going supplemental can have a big impact on your homepage's rankings. And while the fact that (as you mentioned) your internal pages didn't have much unique content was a big factor in them going supplemental, the main cause was actually that those pages were very poorly linked.
When we analyzed your site, many pages had very few links pointing at them either internally or externally. Thus, they don't get enough PageRank to stay in the main index. PageRank isn't the major ranking factor it once was, but it still plays a huge role in keeping your pages indexed.
In fact, Matt Cutts and several other Google engineers have stated on multiple occasions that the reason pages end up in the supplemental index is because of lack of PageRank. In our experience this is not entirely true, as we've even seen PageRank 6 pages go supplemental, but in general getting more links to a page will pull it out of the supplemental index.
In your case, once your pages went supplemental, links from them no longer counted. And since nearly all those pages linked back to your homepage, your homepage lost a large number of internal links. That's a big reason for the drop in your homepage's rankings.
You can do two things to fix this: First, build more links to your homepage to increase your rankings and make up for the internal links you lost when your pages went supplemental.
Second, get some more deep links to your internal pages so that PageRank is flowing through your site better and pulls your internal pages out of the supplemental index. Often the best way to get those internal links is to create an article designed to garner a lot of incoming links (aka linkbait) and place it on your site, then promote it through social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon. We discuss social media promotion in depth here:
How to Create Content, Build Links and Increase Search Rankings by Marketing with the Digg Effect
An Online Marketer's Guide to Link Building with Digg
Once you create an article and get some links to it, you can then link that article to some of your other internal pages so that PageRank begins to flow to them and they come out of the supplemental index. Your main focus should be on getting more links to your internal pages so that they come back into the regular index and can help your rankings again. We cover more on the supplemental index here:
How to Reprieve Banished WebPages From Google's Supplemental Index Graveyard
How to tell when building links via blog comments is a good idea...and when it's a complete waste of time.
- I've heard a number of SEOs recently tout the advantages of making blog comments in order to build links. Some go so far as to hire other people to leave comments on blogs with a link pointing back to their site. Does this actually work?
Answer: It can, although it's not the most time-effective type of link building and it can have negative consequences both in terms of your personal reputation and terms of wasted time and effort if you do it wrong.
At one point, leaving comments on other people's blogs was a cheap and easy way to build links. Your typical blog comment form has four fields: name, email address, URL, and your comment. It's in the URL field that the link building advantage lies, since once you post your comment your name automatically becomes a link which points back to whatever address you specify in the URL field.
We've actually employed this strategy on a number of occasions when blogs where just taking off (remember when we wrote about it?), and were consistently able to quickly take a new site to a PageRank 4 or 5 and some pretty decent rankings mostly just on the back of a few dozen carefully placed blog comments.
Of course, it didn't take too long before spammers also realized this feature was a goldmine of easy links. This gave rise to the nofollow tag, which really didn't do much to slow down spam but it sure cut down on the effectiveness of blog comments as a link building tool.
These days, most blog comments are nofollowed by default, meaning the link juice they pass is effectively nil (nofollow links did still manage to pass a tiny amount of link juice until recently; Google now claims to have now blocked it completely though you can still get small bumps in Yahoo and Microsoft). So if you (or someone you're paying) is going around leaving lots of blog comments in hopes of boosting rankings, you're mostly just wasting time and money.
That's bad, of course, but it can get much worse if you're not careful. After years of being comment spammed, many bloggers have developed a keen eye towards what is a real comment that contributes versus what is just a lame "nice job, keep up the great work" comment used solely to build links. Once they spot you trying to spam their blog (which isn't hard, after all you're linking back to your own site) don't be surprised if they call you out publicly on their blog. If it's a reasonably high-profile blog this can lead to a very embarrassing reputation management headache.
There are still many blogs which don't use the nofollow tag. Many consider themselves part of the dofollow movement whose opinion it is that nofollow has done nothing to stop spam and lots to make people behave in stupid ways when it comes to their linking. You might consider just restricting your comments to those blogs which don't use nofollow. You can find a pretty large selection of them here:
By searching out high PageRank pages on these blogs and leaving comments you can actually build some pretty decent links. Just use a tool like this one to do a site search ordered by PageRank.
But realize that any of these blogs could decide to add the nofollow tag to their comments at any time and effectively render all your work worthless in an instant. More importantly, these people will likely be finely tuned to attempts to spam their blogs and won't be kind if they catch you doing it.
Does that mean blog comments are a total waste of time when it comes to link building? Actually, no. Leaving pointless comments on blogs for link juice certainly can be a waste of time. But leaving insightful comments that contribute something valuable to a blog can actually be a great way to build links, albeit indirectly.
Other than writing your own articles, one of the best ways to become known as an expert in your industry is to leave excellent comments on the blogs of the leading voices in your niche. Not only is this a great way to get yourself noticed and begin building a relationship with that authority, but readers of that blog will see your comments, which means your voice is being heard by a large audience and some of them will follow the comment link back to your site. If you've got great stuff to offer them there too then it's a highly effective way to build your audience.
It helps if you use a memorable name in the comments so that people begin to recognize you. It doesn't need to be too outlandish, but if you're just signing your comments Joe or JC people will probably have a hard time distinguishing you from all the other Joes leaving comments on that blog.
Done this way, you can build relationships, reputation and traffic—all of which will indirectly lead to links, provided your site has something worthwhile to link to. But old school comment spamming for the most part will just lead to wasted time, effort and money—not to mention a potential public relations black eye which can be tough to remove from the search results.
When employing this approach, it also helps to be able to determine what are the most important blogs in your niche, which leads us to our next question...
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