Dec 31, 1969 23:59:59 GMT?

[parahost]

I noticed that the majority of the pages on one of my sites not only showed a cached version of my site that was probably two months old or more, but the cache date said Dec 31, 1969. Also, these pages have been marked as "supplemental" for some reason.

Does anyone know what this means?

[tantalus]

The supplemantal index is a seperate index which some see as being one step away from being removed completly from google.

One possibilty is that your server was down during a google crawl ang gbot was unable to index your pages, another issue that is associated with the supplemantal index is that of dupe content. (A lot of scraper sites seem to appear in this index - whay-hey)

Whatever the case Google sees this as an auxilliary index and will only use it if there are not enough results in the main index to fulfil a specific -hard to find- query.

If your server was down temporarrily there seems a good chance of recovery, if not no-one seems to be giving examples of recovering from this index.

"cache date said Dec 31, 1969": I believe the day before the first unix system date and sometimes used by engineers to tag or id files. This may also be the case with Google engineers.

The problem has aslo been associated with "results crowding", the &filter=0 issue, and recent google screwedupnesses.

No-one seems to be able to put their finger on it exactly.

This is all just off the top of my head and I'm quite happy to be corrected on any of the above.

[siteseo]

tant that's a pretty good rundown on it. Google tells me that they put "fewer restraints" on url's that they crawl for the supp index (for example, too many param's in a URL).

Another good way to get into the supp index is to have too many dashes in your domain name (3+) AND not add any content to the site for awhile or gain new IBL's, etc. Orphaned pages also go there frequently.

Not a fun place to go...