Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Amidst the questions we all have about recent changes in Google, one question I have had is, does Google take pages out of the supplemental index if they were previously deemed as duplicate and rewritten?
If a page is listed as supplemental, and the content is completely rewritten (but still about the same subject) is it possible that Google will visit that page and reindex it as original content (thus removing the supp status)?
Todd
Remember that there are several types of Supplemental Results.
For a page that goes 404 or the domain expires, Google keeps a copy of the very last version of the page that they saw, as a Supplemental Result and show it in the index when the number of other pages returned is low. The cached copy will be quite old.
For a normal site, the current version of the page should be in the normal index, and the previous version of the page is held in the Supplemental index.
If you use search terms that match the current content, then you see that current content in the title and snippet, in the cache, and on the live page.
If you search for terms that were only on the old version of the page, then you see those old search terms in the title and snippet, even though they are not in the cache, nor found on the live page. That result will be marked as Supplemental.
There are also supplemental results where the result is for duplicate content of whatever Google considers to be the "main" site. These results seemingly hang around forever, with an old cache, a cache that often no longer reflects what is really on the page right now. Usually there is no "normal" result for that duplicate URL - just the old Supplemental, based on the old data. On the other hand, the "main" URL will usually have both a normal result and a Supplemental result (but not always).
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I also posted these comments last month:
Right now I see some interesting bugs in the Supplemental logic.
site:domain.com inurl:www brings 98000 www pages all with a recent cache.
site:domain.com -inurl:www brings 24000 www pages (even though the search says to exclude all www pages) all of them marked as Supplemental and all showing a cache date of almost a year ago.
That should not be happening.
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Add to that the pages with meta robots noindex tags on them that have been indexed and cached, and are showing as Supplemental Results with a cache from 2005 June or July, and Google has a bit of a problem on their hands right now.
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Oh, and searches with a hyphen in them are not fixed either. Search for an email address with a hyphen in it. See what results you get. Search again, replacing the hyphen with a space and see that thousands of supplemental pages appear from nowhere - all for pages that have (or had) the email address printed on them at some time.
Steveb:
It will index the new content and keep the supplemental. You can't get rid of a supplemental, but normally it is easy to get new content also indexed.
Then would you surmise from a purely ranking standpoint and your experience that a 'rewrite' on a page is less useful in the current state than simply writing a new page (and essentially url) for content?
I have some content recently that has gone supplemental unfortunately beause it was publishable material (we allowed others to publish it earlier and since do not do this)
It seems MSN and Yahoo has correctly attributed us to be the original ownber of the material, however google sees different :P
g1smd:
It seems as though this supp falls into the dupe content supp category, even though the content is all ours and written by me.
Todd
[edited by: CainIV at 5:43 am (utc) on July 17, 2006]
This emphasizes the need to use unique content - and protect your property at all times.
With the current fashion being to put one page (with footer links) on 5,000 sites, Google couldn't change the system, even if they wanted to. The web would drown in seconds. :)
