A lot of bloggers complain about their pages going in to Google's supplemental index. This happens to me for just about every new site I launch, but I don't worry about it because the pages recover on their own as the site ages. However, sometimes pages go supplemental and stay that way. Not a good thing.
One of the techniques for pulling pages out of the supplemental index is by improving the internal link structure between blog posts. Sure, we all have categories, tags, and sitemaps, but the best internal links are those surrounded by text rather than those off to the side in a navigation block.
And that's where the aLinks plugin comes in. I actually can't believe I missed this one since it's been available since August 2005. I'm just glad a discussion with a co-worker motivated me to do a search for this functionality. Anyway, this WordPress plugin allows you to specify a list of phrases and associate links with each phrase. As a post is displayed, the plugin will search for the phrases and turn them in to hyperlinks on the fly and transparent to users.
For old blogs this is fantastic. With some set up, you can have each of your blogs posts crosslinked in an intelligent and meaningful fashion. In addition, new posts automatically inherit the links you set up and if you ever want to change a URL, you need do so in only one spot. Awesome!
I would recommend is that you go easy on the number of links per page. Also, don't link every occurrence of a phrase on a single page. Rather, just have the first one turned in to a link. Not only is this good SEO, but you'll also keep your pages from becoming visually unappealing.
If you know of any really useful SEO-related plugins, let me know. Who knows what else I've missed.
- SEO Blogs That DoFollow
- Link Bait for SEO
- Passing Link Juice with 301 Redirects
- Don't Bother with Link Building
- Reciprocal Links 2.0
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The reason that blogs go to the supplemental index is that most of our blog pages are dynamic (PHP, ASP, etc) and the search engine robots don't see them. You can use web-based HTML converters, but that is costly and inconvenient.
There will be a new tool coming out soon, I have heard, that will fix this problem.
Hi Gail,
Interesting thought, but I disagree. Well-formed URLs are fine whether they are dynamic or not. You don't need to have an actual HTML file sitting on the server to achieve rankings or stay out of the supplemental index.
I like to think i'm learning, but when i learn one thing another comes along, 24hours in the day is just never enough, cheers for your insight
i hope there is similar plug in or code i can use for blogger… T_T this is really cool plug in!