Table Tricks for SEO

In addition to the infamous sandbox, google has come up with something fiendish called the supplemental index. The supplemental index is basically a black hole, where your pages are spidered by the bot, and everything works just fine, except that these pages will never show up in search results. The main reason why a page would enter the supplemental index is because Google thinks of these pages as duplicates, within your site. Like, for instance, you have an archive page, and the contents of the archive match the contents of the other pages. It could also be because you use a standard template for all the pages, and they end up looking the same to google, especially if the main content is small, and the template is quite big. Google will dump the entire lot into the supplemental.

So what's the solution? After trolling the net, I found there's a few things you can do to bring your pages out of supplemental jail.

• Scrap your archive system
• Start getting some important backlinks, from pages and sites with PR4 or above.
• Fiddle with your design, so that Google sees te main text first, instead of your template.
• Make sure the main text is way bigger than the template.

More details on this below.

You can also use a few tricks which I used to use, and which seemed to go out of fashion with the emergence of CSS. But with Google cracking down on template mistakes, it might be time to dust off the old table tricks cookie jar. What you do is very simple. The basic problem here is that what the googlebot sees wen it enters one page is teh same as what it sees when it enters every other page, which is your template header, or a banner, or some text wich is common to all your pages. Moving this part of the template way down in the source view, while keeping it at the top when you open the page in your browser is what you want here. How's it done? Using a few blank colums and a small gif known as transparent.gif. You can see the full technique here.

I have used this neat table trick in the past, and Google dutifully showed up the first line of the main text body in search listings and descriptions of a page. Of course, it also means you skip the description meta tag, and I have never found any use for aforementioned tag. Still, never let it be said I didn't warn you.