Getting out of Google’s Supplemental Index

First, you need to find out why you’re in it. That’s easier said than done, but Jim Boykin of We Build Pages has some ideas:

1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

I can vouch for these. And keep in mind that duped content can be from copying yourself, such as having a mirrored site, for example.

So how do you get out?

1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

But once you’ve changed what’s causing it, you’ve got to get Google to come back around. I agree that the best way to do that is to create a Google sitemap and to ping Google with it.