Million Dollar Portfolio

After creating my blog The Proficient Investor I began reprinting articles that had to do with the stocks I mention regularly on that site. I figured my readers would be glad to find all the information in one place. Little did I know that Google had an evil plan to relegate me to “Google Hell” or as you may have read on other blogs, the Google Supplemental Index.

I had a somewhat small panic as I realized all the content I was producing was being seen by Google as duplicate content and so was putting me in the same prison cell as spammers. That wasn’t going to do at all.

After having nearly 500 articles in the supplemental index I decided to do something about it.

First, I found every reference I could about Google Hell and Supplemental results and SEO tools and just about everything I could get my hands on. Several things were extremely helpful such as the All-in-one SEO plugin for Wordpress but I think the most helpful thing has been to completely eliminate the “duplicate content” like the articles I was publishing that existed elsewhere.

This is important because I really had no idea when i started my blog that it would even be an issue. It wasn’t until I started reading up on SEO techniques that I became aware that it might possibly be an issue.

So I experimented with some of the other things, like the SEO plugin for Wordpress and optimizing my blog code, making post titles more search worthy by removing the dynamically created titles that end in ?p=122 for example. Search engines, it turns out mostly ignore those kinds of things. I decided to go with the hyphenated titles which seems to be par for the course on most other blogs. After a few days I noticed a small decline in the supplemental results which I checked using the SEO firefox extension from SEO Book.

Since that wasn’t really doing it, I then made a big decision which I don’t regret at all. I went through my entire blog and removed every post that I hadn’t written myself. I eliminated every single post that wasn’t unique. After about 3 weeks I noticed a significant decline in my supplemental results.

Today the Google supplemental results total just over 200. Since it takes some time for Google to re-spider my site, a lot of the pages are still coming up but as a 401 not found now. In time I am convinced the supplemental results will all but disappear which should bring back some amount of traffic from search results that actually exist.

So I guess my point in all this is that if you aren’t writing original content, start to. If you are copying other people’s content, even press releases or some part of another blog, stop it. It’s a fact that Google has most of the search engine marketplace, so it’s in your best interest to do whatever you can to make sure searches for your site are coming up when and how they are supposed to. If you’ve gotten yourself into Google Hell, don’t worry, you can get out but you are going to have to do a bit of work and you really are going to have to be patient. It’s worth all the effort you have to go through.

If you follow my steps and do a little digging you may find others that work for you as well. There are a lot of bloggers out there that have experienced these issues so get out there and find them if what you found here isn’t quite doing it for you.

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