photopassjapan - 1:31 pm on Nov 12, 2006 (gmt 0)

steveb, i think you are right with a page needs to be crawled to get out of the supplemental index, but not right on that alone will solve the "problem".

Although i think you're right that not any NEW page will be tagged as supplemental right from the start. Or perhaps not any page that is crawled at the level of other supplementals will show up in the index after being crawled, but passed on to the supplemental index, which is updated like... 3 to 4 times less often perhaps? Okay i have no idea about this, but here's what i've seen:

We were worried about pages going suddenly supplemental on our site so i monitored some pages closely and am now somewhat relaxed, for i think we understood the way it works, and that it's not a plague, not a penalty, but a new way of saying uninportant (PageRank 0, not TBPR but PR0 ). I'm not 100% sure, it's just what we're experiencing by looking at the few hundred static pages on our site that are going though this.

Most pages that were tagged supplemental had the same meta description tags two months ago, so i thought that might be the problem, not to worry, since they've been updated with the proper information for like... one and a half month now. Although it was somewhat of a disturbance that not ALL same meta pages were tagged supplemental eventhough they've been indexed relatively at the same time... some were, and some weren't. But we kept saying to ourselves for two weeks... that they are in the navigation as everything else, so no problem, it's a new site, it's a large site, G will eventually index them again, and they'll get out.

Yea well...
Wrong.
Again =.=
( i miss all too often in this area )

Some pages have been indexed since then.
With the proper meta tag.
Needless to say that the pages had no more in common than the navigation and the description, so... they're not duplicates.

And they're still supplemental.

...

And at the same time, some that were still using the old description were not.

I did some more research and found that our navigation might seem linear to G from a certain point, meaning pages are not "same level". Imagine an index page with image links ( thumbnails ) to 50 single pages, all with a picture, a title, a label, location, etc. But there is an alternate, manual-slideshow-like anchor text "overruling" this ( i guess. For there's no code or frames or anything asking G to do this. ) So the albums get crawled through the "first picture, last picture, next picture, previous picture" links, linearly instead of the also pretty basic thumbnail links.

Meaning the PR3 index pages pass on PR to the first, the last, the second and the second last pics... PR 2..1.. and that's IT.

What this has to do with supplementals?

Well... the PR0 pages in between are being crawled allright, but even with the updated info, they're still going supplemental. Except those that were being linked from somewhere else ( but those are not PR0 anyway ). Reason: the image link from the PR3 index did not pass on importance. BAM!
Supplemental :)
Uninportant.

And the message is...
The message is that we're sending the wrong message, of some pages being 25 times LESS important than others. While we obviously feel they're, or should be at the same level, the links say otherwise. So... make the navigation reflect this decision, right?

IF this is right, then it could read... Dear people, you have site navigation "problems". Well in fact they're not probelms, unless you want these pages to be in the primary or even the normal index. Just bring the pages you think that should be, to the same level in case it is so. But be reasonable. And don't say that any single page is as important as the index.

( in our case, all pages in the album sharing the same low, but not TOO low importance )

And yes, i've seen pages come out from supplementals because of this. I mean... it works. For us... right know, it does.

Basically it's common sense from G.