Ever since Google started deftly dealing with duplicate content, I’ve noticed a big drop in this website’s traffic. It seems that there has been some adjustments in the indexing and ranking of my site. A number of my webpage content have suddenly gone into the Supplemental results index, otherwise known as Google Hell.
The supplemental results index usually show up in SERPS only after the normal results. This means less visibility for those webpages. Google wants to prevent questionable pages from getting massive exposure. This happens when website’s have duplicate content on other webpages.
I have a strong suspicion that this is caused by my RSS feeds. Google might be mistaking them as duplicate content. I have to create a robots.txt file with the following content to inform GoogleBots not to include the links to their index:
User-agent: Googlebot
Disallow: /*/feed/$
Disallow: /*/feed/rss/$
Disallow: /*/trackback/$
Aaron also suggests that posts should be made longer, sitewide repetitive features be reduced and that links to garbage sites be strictly avoided. I’ve gone and followed Steven Bradley’s suggestions for now.
October 16th, 2007 at 3:16 pm
[...] Feeds can also be a source of duplicate content. When your feed is indexed, it is obviously the exact same copy of your posts, right? An obvious duplicate content. So, what to do? Don’t let the feeds get indexed. I blocked my default RSS feeds on this blog by editing the robots.txt file. You can check my robots.txt file to see what I did here. I got this idea from Jozzua. [...]