Half’s SEO Notebook

I’ve been generally keeping up with WMW posts and other SEO blogs and even kept webmaster radio running since noon today, but nothing is really grabbing my interest. I do have a pile of blog post drafts sitting around unfinished, though some of it is so specific to my domains that I’m not sure who will benefit from reading them. I opened up this blog to keep my thoughts organized, but I don’t want to go so far as to air dirty laundry in public (like the mess BD made after March 28). I’ve also spent some time today checking out Google’s calendar and Google Reader after Pluck started freezing IE. Because of that, I didn’t get a whole lot done today. A female buddy from Holland kept ICQing me throughout the day, which didn’t help either.

Anyway, here’s a few casual observations on how these supplemental test pages are doing on Google. The results are temporary so what’s not supplemental today may not even be in the index a few days from now. Also, the fact that these test pages aren’t in English may have an effect in keeping these pages from going supplemental. I may have to find a random text generator in English. It could also be that recently crawled pages are handled differently than before and pages are either dropped or indexed, instead of falling into supplemental index (just a guess).

• Pages with unclosed head/body tags are indexed fine.
• Pages 60%, 75%, 80% similar to the original is not supplemental.
• A page with unique title/description but the same body text as the original page is not supplemental.
• Original page is indexed.
• A tiny page with 20 words is indexed and not supplemental.
• A previously indexed page 90% similar to the original is gone from the index. The root page http://seo4fun.com/ is also gone; only /index.html remains. Is this an indication that Google is dropping pages from the index instead of storing them in the supplemental index? Or are duplicate content pages just being filtered out from SERPs?
• Notice that optimization for these pages are identical (just one occurance of keyword) but this SERP is making me think #1 is a direct result of keyword placed at the start of a sentence.
• This SERP shows the 80% similar page get dumped in omitted results, because the paragraph containing the keyword is identical for those pages.
• One weird thing I noticed is the normal SERP returned 9 of 13 (4 pages omitted) and 11 when I clicked the omitted results link. The 4 omitted pages are those starting a paragraph “Se4funsupp testcases nullam velit libero” phrase. In this case, Google somehow chose the 60% similar page and dumped the rest in omitted. The omitted pages are: 80% similar / The original page / Unique title and desc identical body text / 70% similar. Now for different queries, I can see pages getting omitted, but its interesting that Google picked the 60% similar page to keep in the SERPS. It could be due to something else but only one incoming link goes to each page so everything else should be equal. Also, when I click the omitted results link these 4 pages go back in but why only 11? Which are the 2 missing pages? A page with broken head/body tag (2-15) and (2-11) 100 Words page disappears. Not sure why they poof.

By the way, a brief update to my previous MSN post. This SERP shows the home page and SEO combined page in 1st/2nd in Google. The home page is probably ranking 1st merely due to PR 3 (other PR 3s are /blog/ and /carcasher page). I’ll mention the keyword once on this page (”Brandnewsacx1 sasahz”) and see how high it ranks. Notice many of the keyword stuffed pages ranking high. Though a page with keyword in the title still ranked higher than any of the keyword stuffed pages, I still got this SERP - keyword repeated 11x (4th) 10x(5th) 9x(6th). Coincidence? Probably, but it’s eery.