Search engine optimization?

OK, first of all, this only applies for Google.

I was comparing one of our competitors: experts-exchange with DevShed.

When searching for their second top poster, almost none of the 1000 out of 9200 results we see fell into one of their "Supplemental Results"...

However, when we search for our ever so active Sepodati, the third result (and almost all of the rest) is already a Supplemental Result.

Perhaps something's wrong with how DS is displayed to Google? This means that DS is not displayed in the main index when searches are done, and won't be visited again. (at least those threads) If we really rely on Google hits, something needs to be done about this... Just my observation...

or alternatively ExpertSexChange has about 30 questions asked per minute and so has more for google to index....

Oh and it also highlights exactly the post that helps so people tend to know they found the answer, so people dont keep going down the list of google results

--J

Neither one of those would explain why we have more supplemental results. We have been aware of this for some time but Google refuses to answer our inquiries, or any inquiries for that matter.

J

I believe it does affect the results though, i've suspected for a while that google counts the number of pages of results you click through to know whether to throw earlier results further down the stack etc.

And once you're in the supplemental, it's awkward to come out

Have you asked the people at SEO Chat? Some of the people in there (apart from generally being assholes) are pretty knowledgeable about how google works.

Actually we just got to the bottom of this. The results that are being scored as supplemental are our LEGACY urls - all urls have since been changed to reflect page title/thread title, those are showing just fine. It will take a while for the old legacy urls to shuffle out of G and by seeing them labeled as Supplemental it means they are finally on the way out so the new urls will recieve full value.

J

LP, this has nothing to do with the paranoia, but if we could add the meta tags of "noindex and nofollow" in the legacy URLs, we could remove them.

Besides that, there's not a single way to remove them because the Supplemental Results get never cached or visited again.

Supplemental Results are probably because they had number-ish URLs.

Google never returns questions. The ones that do get answered are mostly automated. Last time I asked about the Supplemental Results, they said they were part of the "secret technology" and they cannot talk about it. In reality, it only means that they can augment their indexing numbers without actually visiting often as the other SEs like Yahoo! or MSN.

Odd methodology you have there. What about page/traffic ranking by google/alexa respectively?

Google Page Rank
experts-exchange:- 7/10
forums.devshed.com :- 6/10
www.devshed.com : 8/10

On Alexa Site Rankings
Traffic Rank for devshed.com: 3,261
Traffic Rank for experts-exchange.com: 943

Alexa=meaningless - I can assure you we have way more traffic than they do, Alexa ONLY rates sites whose users are using the Alexa toolbar. Hardcore developers would rather be shot than use a Alexa toolbar.

Especially since it is full of spyware...

That and it's annoying

Yep but at least on pagerank, devshed is above expert-exchange. (It isn't that bad on Alexa if you look at the likes of

- fedoraproject
- fedora.redhat.com)

Last I checked the pagerank of devshed itself (not the forums) it was only a 4 but the forums were a 6.

When checking page rank you must include the www

check the PR of

www.devshed.com you will see its a 8