When I’m advising clients on how to improve their website, normally I have to push really, really hard to encourage them to update the website regularly with new content. Blogging is obviously an easy way to do this but there are others ways. e.g. an e-commerce shop might add customer reviews, extended descriptions etc on a regular basis. Sometimes I’ll recommend adding a news page as an alternative way of saying “go write a blog”.

The thing is, normally when I recommend a path like that, the good intention is there but the site doesn’t get updated that often. As a result most sites do OK in search engines but are never firing on all cylinders.

What happens when the plan goes the other way? What when you start writing screeds and screeds of content, or worse yet, cut’n'pasting thousands of pages of old Powerpoint presentations, proposals, case studies, technical documents etc?

Does your customer really need or want it? Sure search engines will lap it up and it will probably bring more one-time visitors into your site, but do you really want to be feeding all this stuff into your loyal readers RSS feed or email newsletter?

So how do you get it right?

If you are planning on adding tons of less-than interesting content, do it in a way that places it in an archive or knowledge base. Try not to throw it down the throats of your repeat visitors or readers. Keep it out of the RSS feed and don’t tell people in your newsletter that you’ve just uploaded a technical document from 2001.

Or better yet, why not pick and choose the best of the content and leave the rest out? The stuff that you do put in could be introduced in such a way that it lets your reader know the relevance of putting it in now.

Do it that way and introduce it to your readers in the right way and they might just end up lapping it up. If you simply deluge people with crap they will unsubscribe. If you’re serious about adding content there’s definitely a balance that has to be achieved. Get it right and you’ll reap the rewards of loads of visitors from search engines AND loads of repeat visitors.

I run a holidays in Scotland website. It’s been quite a successful site and gets lots of readers and hopefully helps people with information for their holidays. Aside from the hand edited directory and articles there is a blog and a forum. When Google updated to Big Daddy, the number of pages listed in Google tanked seriously down to just 74 pages. All of the blog pages and all of the forum pages with the exception of the blog home and forum home pages disappeared.

This week they are all back – as supplemental results.

Now I’m sure that everything I’ve written in the blog is original and of use to somebody, otherwise I wouldn’t have written it. Similarly the posts in the forum really help people with information they need for their holidays. So why are they supplemental? Could it be because no-one links to each of these pages. If this is the case, then a lot of pages across the internet that have valuable and unique content are going to be relegated to supplemental results because they don’t have inbound links.

So I’ve decided to try an experiment. Here is a link to a sitemap on another domain. In there I’m going to bookmark all of the missing pages from the blog but not the forum. In theory Google should then pick all the blog posts up again because someone is linking to each page (me). Also, if the blog posts get reindexed and the forum pages do not I’ll know I’m onto a winner.

Anyone else got any ideas how to get out the supplementals and back in the main index?

There are winners and losers in every Google update, and it must be said that Big Daddy on Google has been no different. I’ve had sites continue to do really well, and I’ve got one old site that’s down to just having the homepage listed. The final site that has been effected is my holidays in Scotland website.

Now this site has been running happily for around 5 years, I think. It’s a hobby site. I add a bit every now and again, check the links occasionally and generally update it on a monthly basis (apart from a couple of sections which I’ll come to). It’s got good links to it and really decent traffic.

Since the last update though, almost all of the Scottish blog and Holiday Scotland forum pages have disappeared. I can’t figure out why either. They’ve got good content which gets updated regularly, all of it unique and nothing spammy about them. Using a Google Sitemap and even contacting them through the Help us Improve link hasn’t done anything. I’ve read through Matt Cutts update post and I’m still bamboozled.

The thing is, the blog has some good info in it, definitely of value to travellers to Scotland and the forum is starting to pick up with lots of good transport and travel info being doled out.

So, if Google is ignoring this info, are they really giving the best possible results to their users? Or are they finally groaning under the strain and need to pass some love over to MSN and Yahoo who do still index everything. There is no doubt that the Big Daddy update did remove a lot of spam from the results, but it also removed a lot of valuable info and by doing that Google in my estimation has finally started doing things wrong. I can no longer be convinced that when I search in Google that I’m going to see the full spectrum of results, including perhaps, the info I’m looking for. When more people realise this, I think MSN and Yahoo might just see a few more searches coming their way.