supplemental problem of the day

Site: search lists supplementals BEFORE other pages?

[justbrowsing]

My site is currently showing 88 pages on Google. All but 15 pages used to be supplemental, so I got a few more links, purged my meta tags and titles of duplicate content, etc. And now, a site: search reveals the following odd behaviour:

first 9 results normal listings
results 10-49 supplemental
results 50-88 normal listings again

I've not seen this before - are my normal pages so distasteful to Google that it's listing them AFTER my own supps?

[g1smd]

What are the Supplemental Results for?

Are they for URLs that are now redirected, or 404, or for pages that are still served with a "200 OK" status?

The answer to that is very important, as each different type needs a completely different fix.

[justbrowsing]

About half are old 404, and half are just normal, present pages. I had mostly supps until a few days ago, when I took some advice on these forums (thanks guys) and almost immediately most of the supps went live. I was just confused to see my supps ranking higher in a site:search than my normal, unsuppy pages. Now that my supps have diminished, I'm more concerned about the apparent low ranking of my normal pages. Maybe this is just very low ranking as a result of having very competitive keywords, though, as somebody here pointed out - I may be stuck in a kind of secondary sandbox for those. (This is a travel site. My next site will be about Iranian marshmallow clogs... number 1, here I come!)

[justbrowsing]

After another look at my supps, they're all either 404 pages or pages which were 404, but were recently reinstated (a section of the site I killed, and then had a change of heart and replaced - silly boy). So the supps I'm happy with. I just wish Google saw my other pages as more imporant than supps, and that I was getting more than 1-2 google search referrals on a 90 page original content site (those 1-2 I have a sneaking suspicion are my own testing). But well, that's the game, isn't it? On with the battle! ...

[g1smd]

The Supplemental Results for URLs that return a true 404 response will be dropped after one year.

Make sure that your custom 404 error page gives them enough information to easily find the correct section of your current live content.

Pages that were 404 and are now live again will need to be respidered to reappear in the normal index. Some new links to those pages will alert Google to their now live again status.

However, you'll have a dilemma. Those pages will continue to show as Supplemental Results for searches based on old content, and as normal results when you search for any of the new content, assuming that some edits, however minor, were recently made to the pages.

[justbrowsing]

Hello g1smd,

thanks for your reply. The reinstated pages of the old 404 content are identical to their previous incarnation, but I'm happy enough to let them sit there and update them as time goes on - they aren't a priority part of the site but it occurred to me that they'd do more good online than offline while I wait to get around to improving them (in terms of in-depth content). The main thing is that, thanks to following the advice that I received on this forum only a few days ago, I managed to get the rest of my pages out of the supplemental index. Now that's a fast turnaround!

So thanks to you and the others who advised me on my previous thread - now I just need to start working more on my IBLs and keywords, so that I can start crawling up the SERPS (you know you're in trouble when you have to switch your Google prefs. to 100 results per page in order to speed up searching for your site!).

One last question, if I may: what does it mean in the site:search when many of my non-supp pages actually rank AFTER the supps, ie: 1.normal pages - 2.supps - 3.normal pages? Does it mean that my pages while not supps, are no better than supps, or does it just mean that Google is odd?

[g1smd]

It means that some of your best performing pages you took offline for a while, and now they are back.

I don't really know what influences the order, but I do know that if the root index page isn't the first in the list, then some people feel that indicates a problem with the site in general.

[justbrowsing]

Well then, I'm glad I brought them back! And, fortunately, my root index is no. 1 in my site:search so I don't have any worries there. Thanks for all your help, g1smd.