Internet Marketing in 10 Minutes

Today we say good bye to the visible “Supplemental Result” identifier for our less than popular pages of any given website. This was a pretty significant metric for most SEO’s out there who relied on it to tell us which of our pages didn’t make the cut.

The announcement came from Google’s Webmaster Central Blog today. The article is Supplemental goes mainstream.

So what does this mean for Internet Marketers? Well it means we are going to have to start analyzing our analytics a bit more in depth to determine which pages are performing poorly and which are performing well for us. This practice shouldn’t be anything new for us since conversion on a site is what should be most important to us.

Anyways, give it a read through; you’ll love to hate this change I think as it does have its advantages.

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Some thoughts on how you encourage your visitors to contact you through your website and a consumers possible opinion on those methods.

Not everyone is going to be as willing to pick up the phone and dial your phone number. Having it listed on your website is obviously a smart move though because you will have those people who have nothing better to do during the day but call and speak to a live person about your services.

Not everyone will be able to click on an e-mail link. In many instances the site visitor may not have a mail client configured on their computer and only rely on free e-mail like hotmail or Gmail. If a visitor gets an install message or error message upon clicking on that e-mail link then you can count that potential client as a definite lost client. E-mails are still important to have on your site though. Some people will have an e-mail client configured so you’ll be able to reach that group of people.

So what is quick and easy to do without having your visitors picking up the phone or copy and pasting your e-mail into their free e-mail providers interface? How about a simple contact form? A contact form is quick and easy, you get to control the data inputted and no one has to install anything fancy or expensive to make it work.

Often the problem comes with the actual processing of a form. Anyone can create a contact form but telling it what to do is the difficult part unless you have a web savvy tech on hand to help you out.

I don’t have all the answers for every type of site out there. However so far I have found providers that are either incomplete, difficult to set up or update and most of them cost some kind of monthly fee. I suspect if I can find one that is fairly built up and EASY to implement then I’d be all for making a suggestion.

For all of you who are techie or just simply want some idea’s on web forms, I would recommend you checking out Jason Bartholme’s 101 Resources to Help You Build a Better Web Form. This was a good enough resource that I Dugg the article and submitted a Sphinn submission myself.

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So you’ve had a link on an authority site for the past three or four years and this year you’ve come to discover that the page your link is found on has slipped into the Supplemental Index.

This same scenario happened for one of my clients as I found out today. I did some quick looking around and discovered that a former client of mine who I know got out of the real estate industry still had a link on this exact same site but on a different page that was indexed.

So I contacted the site owner that I have a link with and asked if he’d be willing to switch out links since it is probably a better idea that he doesn’t have a dead link anyways. Well his response was yes.

Now a whole new question arises for me… Is it better to preserve the link age and keep it on the Supplemental page while hoping that the pages status changes? OR should I abandon the age of the link all together and get a fresh link on an indexed page?

My opinion is this and subsequently it played a role in the route I chose to take…

Waiting around has never accomplished anything other than wasted time. I could wait a week, month or even a year for that page to come out of Supplemental Results. However what if this status change never happens; haven’t I just lost all that time I could have taken advantage of by aging a new link?

So needless to say I ended up moving the link today and scrapping the age of the old link.

I presented my question to several people through out different mediums. This is the question I asked:

Would you trade an aged link that is on a page that has fallen into Supplemental Results for a higher up link on a page that isn’t Supplemental?

Some responses were:

“That’s a stupid question; link one is supplemental and link two is not supplemental AND links higher up.” - Dave J

“I would trade a link from a supplemental page to a non supplemental page because it’s not the age of the link it’s the page it’s on. Over time a page builds trust due to age and the amount of out bound links.

Too many people believe that the age of the link is important in which it’s the actual page. If the page of the aged link fell into supplemental that page is deemed “not as important” in Google’s eyes” – Bryan Siegel

“I believe that supplemental pages don’t hold much power in Google, no matter what Google says to the public. I would be glad to get ANYTHING in return for giving out a supplemental link however if the page is supplemental and ranking for a keyword I’m interested in, then the deal changes a bit” – Sixty6

“If there was no possible way to secure links on both pages (Supplemental and Non-Supplemental), I would go with the higher link on the Non-Supplemental page. This page would get spidered more often, plain and simple. However, I think it would be best to have links on both pages, as pages that have been included in the Supplemental Index have occasionally been known to make a full recovery.” – Little Miss SEO

Does anyone else have additional thoughts to add to this? I’d like to hear what others in the SEO industry have to say!

JJ

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