Blackhat supplemental hell

Wooo. Sounds pretty bad to me. Lots of folks will tell you that blackhats are in hell already. But, supplemental hell? Surely not.

I was tooling around one of my favorite fora when I happened upon an interesting discussion between a few blackhat newbs. Seems the plaintiff was complaining of too many pages in the sup listings over at Google. I shot my mouth off there, so I might as well do it here.

Notice: If you are of the holier-than-thou tightywhities persuasion, this works for you too. SEO is just SEO. Matters not what color your page is. I won’t discriminate against you. (after all, I thought I was a white hat for a long time. LOL)

There are several theories about the cause of supplemental listings. Here are the ones most often found:

1. Supplemental listings are caused by duplicate content on the page.
2. Supplemental listings are caused by too little keyword-rich content on the page.
3. Supplemental listings are caused by too few anchor text links pointing at the page.

I’m not about to get into an argument over which is what or why. Playing “Who Struck John” is never a very productive pursuit. Rather, I’ll give you my solution to all your problems. [Just send $500.00 in care of this station and all of your problems will melt away ]

If I had a blackhat page that was listed as “Supplemental Result” in the Google listings I would use a combination of remedies to take care of all three of the cases above.

I would produce more content for the page. Like, maybe, twice the amount already on the page. So if my page was 1,000 words, I’d shoot for 2k. The content would have the keywords, in context, in all the right places. That should take care of items 1 & 2.

For the supplemental results because of links problems, I would look at my internal link structure first. All of my page titles would contain my keywords. All of my internal links would point to the page with that page title as the link and anchor text. I would use the ‘title’ tag to reinforce the keyword semantics.

Confused yet? Let me give you and example:

Product on the page = Pink Thongs
Page title = Worlds largest supply of Pink Thongs
Link = <a href= "myspamsite.com/worlds-largest-supply-of-pink-thongs. htm" title = "Pink Thongs for Men"> Worlds largest supply of Pink Thongs < /a>

That same process is applied to the site map page(s).

External links are treated much the same way. If you can get anchor text, make sure it is pointing at your page with the correct anchor text. There isn’t much point in getting a lot of links to myspamsite.com/index.whatever. You only need one link to that index page for each SE you are optimizing for. The rest of your links need have to point to interior pages.

That’s about as simple as it is.

A few notes just to be sure we’re on the same page here. Your newly crafted content needn’t be a big hassle. If you are scraping and posting, or if you are using rss listings, just get more. If you are scraping articles, get more of them. If you use a markov chain, do it some more.

Put up some more content and drop a few links. You’ll be out of supplemental hell before you can even spell it.

~dink