How To Find Out if Your Website is in Google’s Supplemental Index

...Or "How I Almost Just Had a Heart Attack because I Just Realized My Entire Blog Was in Google's Supplemental Index."

Apparently in WordPress, if you go to Options > General, you can set the "WordPress address (URL)" & the "Blog address (URL)" and this determines how the links are made to your posts throughout your site.

Unfortunately, mine was set to this: http://dennisplucinik.com/blog

This was causing my website to get penalized for duplicate content because the link to my blog from my root domain was to this: http://www.dennisplucinik.com/blog/

I don't remember setting this up without the "www" or if it was like that by default. Either way it caused me to panic. I have however figured out the problem by changing the URL setting from within WordPress as well as implementing a 301 redirect using this following regular expressions in my .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^dennisplucinik.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.dennisplucinik.com/$1 [L,R=301]

I hope that if anyone else is having this problem this post could shed some light on it for you. Here are the resources which I used to help me figure this out:

Supplemental Result in Google - Hell or Help
Get Your Blog Out of Google's Supplemental Result Hell
.htaccess, 301 Redirects & SEO: Guest Post by NotSleepy
View All Your Google Supplemental Index Results
301 Redirects and Domains With and Without WWW

Update:
I'm happy to report that my site is completely out of the Supplemental index (1 week later). Not bad.

  1. Ivan Minic says:

    Good tip. Duplicate content can generate problems.

  2. Eli says:

    You would think Google would be smart enough to tell the difference between http://www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com ..

  3. You would think so, but they can’t and it blows.

  4. joezul says:

    well, you have to let google know manually. To do this, go to theGoogle webmaster central site, log in to the webmaster tool, and specify which preferred domain you wanted to use. You have to add both site, one with the www and the other without the www before you can set the association.

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