Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
If so I have over 11000 which is totally crazy.
(Make sure you have a space between example.com and ***)
Also are there other hacks like this around. There were allusions to others but no definite examples.
[edited by: tedster at 4:25 pm (utc) on Sep. 14, 2006]
[edit reason] use example.com [/edit]
It's sad when we are getting more traffic from yahoo and msn separately than we are google.
Can you over optimise your page?
I have a php CMS and the title of the thread appears 3 times, once in the keywords, once as the very first text on the page, and finally as the usual heading.
What a pity that there doesn't seem to be somone you can ask about this situation who can give straight accurate advice.
Like most webmasters all we are trying to do is get our pages best optimised for the search engines.
edit:
I think I worked out why they wet supp...
There are often 3 versions
The thread,
The print version
and the reply version.
So I used the robots.txt to remove the others leaving the thread.
In most cases such a listing is a sign of a problem or potential problem.
steveb, when I check the *** hack for established sites with very healthy Google traffic, I still see Supplemental versions of almost every url on the site. It's just that the cache date is older than the version that the regular index returns on a SERP. I see no problem here - it's just Google's standard operating procedure.
Now I also agree that when you see Supplemental Results in a normal site: query, not using this particulr hack, you often do see evidence of some problem or other. Often but not always.
Still, this thread is discussing the *** hack, and it's not at all clear to me that such queries are giving out anything that anyone should automatically become concerned about.
had 200 or so supps listed for a particular domain but one jumped out at me and I thought ohoh. That page had been ranking ok for a couple of terms. So I done a quick check and there it is no.1 or 2 depending on which kw's i use to find it.
The same page, both cache dates 8th sept, the only difference was the page size. Regular says 15k, the supp version says 12k.
strange.
Edit to add that I have checked at least four more pages listed as supps and found them to be ranking fine, without the "supplemental results" tag.
page sizes listed the same way as above.
strange and unreliable.
[edited by: djmick200 at 9:53 pm (utc) on Sep. 15, 2006]
Yes, and any domain that has these is in serious trouble. You have to have had your head in the sand the past two years to not have read inummerable threads where people post of sites going supplemental "overnight". That has always been a mistaken impression. The supplementals were always there, but became dominant for one of many possible reasons.
Having hidden supplementals is cancerous. Most of the time it effects the ranking of the URL. Some of the time it doesn't effect the ranking of that URL much, including being able to have #1 results, but it is always a grave danger.
From just one perspective put the simplest way, if you have no hidden supplementals, then you have no concern about a supplemental dominating a regular result. If you have them, you have the daily worry that the wrong cached version of a URL will become dominant.
===
Also, the *** thing shows supplementals back to at least December 2005, while the old -www variations newer ones. This is particularly worrisome because it means hidden "hidden" supplementals.
From Google's advanced search help: the "keyword site:www.example.com" - will find pages related to this keyword on the www.example.com... So the "* site:www.example.com" should return all the pages in that site? (BTW returns zero for my site)...
This must be some kind of hack (shortcut?) that google is using for something... - good find!
...inummerable threads where people post of sites going supplemental "overnight"
It's not that having any url marked Supplemental Result is a problem, it's that having ONLY Supplemental Results is a problem.
Google's purpose for the Supplemental Index is to report at least something in the results for relatively obscure queries. See this archived GoogleGuy thread from August 2003 [webmasterworld.com].
So yes, having all your just-cached urls shuffled off to the "obscure results" bin is bad news. But old versions of urls whose content has now changed are often kept in the Supplemental Index for a nice long period without hurting anything. And once in a while they may even help by showing up in a search result.
But what treatment has been shown to restore health?
I saw steveb treatment [webmasterworld.com...]
"How to remove (some) Supplemental Listings sort of... maybe",
but have not seen any claims of "patient cured" by this.
Anybody have any success stories?
And no that certainly is not true. In fact it is quite missing the point. First, having a supplemental and a regular result will usually drag the regular result down. Second, Google often chooses to rank the supplemental instead of the full listing.
Having only a supplemental is seldom a problem. It's the result of a problem. Once you only have a supplemental the issues are usually over.
There is no such thing as harmless cancer. Supplementals are never good, even if sometimes they at this moment don't cause any significant behavior problems. In all likelihood though they will eventually.
It's not that having any url marked Supplemental Result is a problem, it's that having ONLY Supplemental Results is a problem.
I kinda support this observation [ but I'm happy to have holes shot through what i say ]
I can see good sites continuing to rank well, which have *some* supplementals, that support this observation. After all, it can depend on what keyword terms are used, as to whether a supplemental result might show.
What is a worry is when using the site:command.com all pages show up as supplemental. To me that say's you've got a lot more work to do on differentiating the content.
If these tools can be believed, and webmasterworld is probably largely unique in it's content, results like this demonstrate some "indicative" credibility:
site:webmasterworld.com *** shows only 5 supplemental pages
out of
site:webmasterworld.com 333,000 [strange figure?!?**?!] pages
Now i'd feel better seeing that than this:
site:mysite.com *** shows 149,000
out of
site:mysite.com shows 140,000!
we did 301 redirect non-www to www and...
searching inurl:www.example.com shows "1-91 of about 94 results" and only the last 3 are supplemental
the supplemental results are a new experimental feature to augment the results for obscure queries ...Hey, pages get added to the supplemental index using automatic algorithms. You can imagine a lot of useful criteria, including that we saw a url during the main crawl but didn't have a have a chance to crawl it when we first saw it.
Think of this as icing on the cake. If there's an obscure search, we're willing to do extra work with this new experimental feature to turn up more results. The net outcome is more search results for people doing power searches.
What googleguy didn't say, and what the experimental feature developers maybe don't realize is:
If a web page is a supplemental result, or if a web page has a doppelganger that is a supplemental result, you can only find the page by doing a power search, no matter how relevant the page may be to some other non-power search.
A doppelganger is defined as a ghostly double of a living person that haunts its living counterpart.
People doing regular searches don't get to see the ghostly double or the living counterpart.
Woe is any poor innocent that redesigns their website or ever has done so.
Although I am still getting hits from my pages, the words "supplemental" have all gone. The listings just look like normal
Do you think they turned the hack off?
Cabo
When I do the site:example.com **keyword I then get all supplemental results.
Strange, when I do the site:example.com *** I get supplemental and non-supplemental results.
There has definately been a change in that operator. It is no longer working.
Strange, when I do the site:example.com *** I get supplemental and non-supplemental results.There has definately been a change in that operator. It is no longer working.
site:www.mysite.com *** -view seems to work.
