Kiter - 5:49 pm on Dec 19, 2007 (gmt 0)

Interesting post, interesting timing. Yesterday on the google webmaster blog:

This led to a major effort to rethink the entire supplemental index. We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these "supplementalization effects" were gone, the "supplemental result" tag itself—which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect—was eliminated a few months ago. Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.

Well I hope so. I run a site in a popular hobby sector, with about 2300 pages of content. We get a fair amount of google generated visits to our supplemental pages, but many many more to the pages in the main index. In the last six months the number of pages in the main index have varied between 30 and 160 – pathetically low - and I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to get the numbers up.

The site’s content in the main-indexed pages is not better than the content in the supplemental index, just different. Any mistakes I’ve made on in-page SEO (I don’t think there are many) have been made in both sets of pages – the site is database-driven and pages are ‘templated’, but text content is appreciably different on each (and urls are unique with no parameters).

I can’t get further than thinking that its mainly a link-juice issue – the site is currently running with a PR3 at the top/second level pages, but I guess very little drips down to the third/fourth level pages, when it has to be shared 2300 times.

Meanwhile I’ll wait for G to start judging my content on its merits, as they promised in the blog yesterday ;)

[edited by: tedster at 6:43 pm (utc) on Dec. 19, 2007]