How I Got My WordPress Blog Posts Out of Google’s Supplemental Results

Whoohoo!

Thanks to cheesehead2 on Web Master World’s forum, all of my WordPress blog posts have been removed from Google’s supplemental results.

Here is the code I used:

< ?php if(is_home() || is_single() || is_page()){ echo '';
} else {
echo '';
}?>

Just add the above code into the HEAD tag of your header.php file.

The Problem Was…

I was wondering why I wasn’t getting the traffic I expected from my new WordPress blog, so I did a search on Google (site:www.mjswebsolutions.com) to find out what web files Google was indexing on my site.

Apparently Google had indexed my blog posts, but they put them in the Supplemental Results. Supplemental results are just that…supplemental. They don’t show up when you do a regular search.

Doing some detective work I found out that when WordPress is setup, it creates many links to the same page (i.e. Calendar, categories, etc.). Google was recognizing this as duplicate content, so I implemented the fix above.

The fix above basically says: index only the blog homepage and each blog post and do not index anything else (i.e. category pages, calendar pages, etc.). As soon as I implemented the fix, my blog posts appeared within the regular search results and were removed from supplemental hell. A proud day. :-)

UPDATE: As soon as I implemented this fix, Google ups and decides to ‘hide’ the Supplemental Result indicator from their results. Whaaaa?