It was quite depressing at the end of April, to see my site's Google Page Rank drop by 1 point. It went down from PR5 to PR4 and it devastated me enough that I didn't even send out a newletter in May. So to correct the situation, I went back to writing articles. I had neglected it for several months, due to my injury.

I also learned that I'm not alone seeing my Page Rank drop. It seems to be a universal thing in Google land. A few saw their rankings go up, but most web sites got kicked downstairs by the Google bossman. Makes me think of the thunder of Niagara Falls from all those rankings dropping down. So if you also experienced this frustration, don't despair, just do what you can to stop the slide. Try this!

I don't go out much since my hip crashed and I'm walking with crutches for over a year now. So for the past 2 months I have been catching up on my article writing. I've added almost 50 pages to my web site, and I've posted new articles to submission sites.

Your web site's PR is mainly determined by the quality and quantity of information you have provided. As of June 4-07 my web site, BestAffiliateProducts.com, had 497 pages of great information on affiliate and niche marketing. So how come my PR went down?

I suspect it is partly a result of many of my good quality guest articles being reclassified, and being placed in this fairly new phenomenon called the Google Supplemental Index.

You no doubt know that when the Search Engines index your web site and place your pages in the main index, it helps you to be found by every day Search requests. The higher your Google Page Rank, the higher up you'll be placed in the Google search results. And of course, this brings more traffic to you.

Unfortunately, when Google can't decide where to place your articles, the pages are dumped into the Supplemental index, and that doesn't help your ranking much. Being in this index implies your information page is of poor quality, or considered "duplicate content". The content is still useful to your readers, but not likely to be picked up by the search engines. Your visitors will only see it once they get on your site some other way or for other info.

It's not clear just how bad that is, but it certainly indicates that it's time to deal with the matter.

I'm still looking for answers, and am doing some tests with linking. It will take some time to see results. The main thing I did was add 50 pages of new content to Best Affiliate Products. I am also starting to see lots of new traffic from the articles I posted to submission sites.

The bottom line is this: Google Supplemental Indexing caused me to do 3 important things.

-1- Write more articles that are uniquely my own.

-2- Post more articles to submission sites. I discovered that posting to hundreds of sites makes a huge difference. Try to post at least 2 articles a week, and you will derive great benefits. If you can write 5 to 8 articles a week, that would be tremendous.

-3- Use a powerful submission software that posts to hundreds of sites. I use only the best, namely Article Submitter Pro. You can learn more about it at my web site.

Warning: Do NOT submit the same article that's on your web site, as it will end up as duplicate content again. Use different versions, by editing 30% to 45% of the text of your web version.

I am astounded at the increase in traffic in just the past week. Because of articles submitted to hundreds of sites, my traffic is actually 50% higher than it was in March, before my Page rank was reduced.

To get my articles out of the supplemental index, there is one more strategy I am testing. When I receive requests to link to related web sites, I ask the party to link back to one of the articles on my site, instead of my home page. I was given this strategy by Colin McNulty, a consultant friend in the UK.

There is more to learn, but never forget it's important to keep writing.