Supplemental Results: What exactly are they

[vite_rts]

< For those who are completely new to this topic, Google sometimes returns
a listing on their search results page marked "Supplemental Result' in green
letters. Such results, taken from Google's separate "Supplemental Index" are
the topic of this thread. >

Hi Guys who know

1, Supplemental pages also get cached, I see this

2, Why does a page get marked as supplemental

3, How are supplemental pages treated during keyword search by web user using google search

4, Do supplemental pages get re-spidered

5, Are changes to supplemental pages re cached

6, Does a page stop being supplemental as soon as google system has fresh spider cache to re evaluate the page eg. directory pages initially light on content but now filled with human edited enteries

7, Are the anecdotal stories of 1 year supplemental status true :-)

Cheers

[edited by: tedster at 10:09 am (utc) on Dec. 22, 2006]

[tedster]

Here's a quote attributed to Matt Cutts in another thread, made while he was advising on one person's website:

having supplemental results these days is not such a bad thing. In your case, I think it just reflects a lack of PageRank/links. We've got your home page in the main index, but if you look at your site ... you'll see not a ton of links ... So I think your site is fine ... it's just a matter of we have to select a smaller number of documents for the web index. If more people were linking to your site, for example, I'd expect more of your pages to be in the main web index.

[edited by: tedster at 4:02 pm (utc) on Oct. 7, 2006]

[g1smd]

To the OP:

Does this lot answer your question?

[vite_rts]

This sure does confirm a lot off things and answer a lot off questions.

Does anyone agree that for new sites, with few trusted links, the importance of the first page, index/default etc , is really quite extraordinary.

I am going to post another thread requesting additions to webmasters tools

Thanks all

[angiolo]

The site: command doesn't work fine in these days. It dependes on the google IP.

For example now the default Google IP search here ( In Italy ) is 72.14.221.104 and it works fine: no supplemental ( or few as usual...) .

[vite_rts]

The answers here do not actually confirm anything contrary to what I posted in error up there, afterall, no Google folk said anything,

However, it does form a considerable body of observed and intepreted information about google's output, particularly as a lot of the responses are from very well informed and experienced webmasters

cheers all

Vite_rts

[g1smd]

There is some extra importance to the root index page. Canonical issues with www vs. non-www and with "/" vs. "/index.html" begin right there.

I guess that one of the factors is simply that those issues impede the proper flow of Pagerank around the site right from the start.

[ichthyous]

One very good thing is that Google seems to be indexing and refreshing at what I would consider to be a "normal" pace again. This summer googlebot became painfully idle and updates were few and far between. My site went almost 100% supplemental last week and yesterday returned to 100% non-supp. I have been throwing major changes at google and its keeping up and refreshing very quickly, just like the old days. My site is not highly ranked at all, just a 4.

[g1smd]

>> My site went almost 100% supplemental last week and yesterday returned to 100% non-supp. <<

If that was seen when using a site:domain.com search, then that was just a bug in the way that Google was working at the time.

The site searches were completely [webmasterworld.com] FUBAR [webmasterworld.com] for a week or more, in most datacentres.

[Pirates]

I think supplemental pages indicate in my opinion:
1. Orphaned pages.
2. Duplicate Content.
3. Pages containing a problem preventing the page listing this may include such things as large amount of inbound links and "sandboxed" pages.
4. Hijacked content
Edit
5. 404's (where previous pages existed)
6. 302's (where previous pages existed)
7. 301's (where previous pages existed)

[edited by: Pirates at 12:36 am (utc) on Oct. 8, 2006]

[g1smd]

Yep, that's sort-of, about it. Not much to add.

Only some of those are things that need fixing: specifically, pages that return "200 OK" that are tagged Supplemental.

[lmo4103]

8. A large number of pages added ... somewhere over 200% ... perhaps?

[Webnauts]

After testing two web sites with duplicated pages today, I can confirm, that one of the each duplicated page goes into the supplemental results.

[g1smd]

Some two years ago, or more, I wrote here at WebmasterWorld about a site that had been properly indexed, but also the development server had been indexed too.

The development server, on a subdomain, had lots of incomplete content, a great deal of old and out of date content, and many things that had been tested out. Much of the content was dummy content, and repeated snippets.

I found that in some caes this junk was ranked higher than the real site. The webmaster was informed, and instead of setting up a 301 redirect from the development server to the real site, or adding a noindex tag to the pages on the development server, he decided to password protect the development server instead.

So, the development stuff slipped into Supplemental and remained there for a long time. Some of it still ranked higher than the main site. If you tried to view the cache you could still see the cached text, but the server then prompted for a password for each and every image on the page.

After a year, the 8000 listed URLs were down to about 2000, and a little later still they were down to 500. A few months later, after a Supplemental Refresh, the number went back up to 1500 or so, and these stayed visible for a long time. At this point, the subdomain no longer even resolved; there was no DNS record for it.

I set up a few links to some of the listed URLs that really needed to be delisted, to see if that would speed anything up. This was long before anyone realised that Supplemental Results stayed in the index for a year whatever you actually did to the site, or the linking. The cache for these pages was about 13 to 18 months old.

About six months ago, the development site was almost totally delisted in a Supplemental Update, and at that time I removed all the backlinks to that site - or so I thought. Up until then I had written multiple posts about the problems with this site, covering at least a year, maybe even 18 months.

.

I haven't checked that site for very many months now, but upon looking today, I see just one URL listed. Having looked further, Google reports zero backlinks for that URL, but Yahoo lists two backlinks, both of which are still live.

The old URL shows a Google cache from only about a month ago, and the URL is NOT listed as Supplemental. The server response is actually "302" for that URL and takes you to a sort-of domain holding page on another domain. Google has indexed that holding-page content as if it were really located at the redirecting URL location. So, 302 redirect URL hijacking is still around people.

As of today, the two backlinks to that redirecting URL have now been removed, and it will be interesting to see what happens next. In any case the URL no longer ranks for any of the content that was at that URL a few years back, and does not interfere with the main-site listings in any way at all (and hasn't done for at least 6 months now).

[edited by: g1smd at 12:46 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]

[Pirates]

Very Interesting, Yahoo has a habit of listing pages within a site whether the content is linked or not and has done this from day one.

[edited by: Pirates at 12:42 am (utc) on Oct. 9, 2006]

[SteveWh]

It's like google passes off the supplementals on foreigners or something!

This also happened when my site first opened. The first few weeks of results were all from outside the U.S., as though they were test marketing my site elsewhere before allowing it locally!

[Pirates]

I think sites that are finding what they believe are good pages go supplemental should take a look at shopping sites that are also targeting there keyword.

[edited by: tedster at 4:51 am (utc) on Oct. 11, 2006]

[nitts]

I'm confused about what supplemental results are.
Is the image linked below an example of supplemental results?

If not, what are they and under what circumstances does it occur?
<screenshot removed - see Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>

Thanks!

[edited by: tedster at 5:44 am (utc) on Oct. 11, 2006]

[tedster]

Supplemental Results are results on the SERP that are marked with the green words "Supplemental Result".

The screenshot that you supplied was for what Google now calls a "SiteLinks [webmasterworld.com]" listing, known previously as and "Extended Description".

[g1smd]

@nitts: start here [google.com] and here [google.com].

[wingslevel]

i am angry about supplementals and i feel like google has abandoned much of its roots as it applies them.

i have a site that doesn't have any of the supplemental issues listed in this thread, so, i am guessing that my pr is just too wimpy to extend down to my lower sub-pages (many of which are supplemental)?

thing is, all of the pages on my site have been listed for a long time, so is google "raising the pr bar" in order to be included in the real (non-supplemental) index?

in my case the site is home page pr5 and has about 2k inbound links - all on topic and no exchanged or bought links. the site has been around for almost 10 yrs and is definitely a "trusted site" in its sector.

thing is, we have about 55,000 pages - like many others here, i have not focused much on pr in the last few years (now seems like that was a mistake) and so many of my deep sub-pages are pr0 - there is no penalty here, just that the homepage pr 5 slowly erodes as you drill down into the site - in my case our class pages are typically pr4, then come the category pages at pr3, then the subcategory pages at pr2, the the product group pages at pr 1, and finally - yep, you guessed it - the item pages at pr0.

I guess, mathematically, you could come up with an amount of homepage pr that you would need to get at least a pr1 on all 55,000 pages - obviously my 5 isn't enough.

[g1smd]

The "single redirected URL" that was mentioned above can no longer be found in the SERPs.

It looks like simply removing the links to it made it disappear (might be something else).

[crimsonblack]

so basically

IS supplemental Bad? i just watched a video by matt cutts and according to him he doesnt say its bad?

i have sites where each site has like 5 pages that are not supplemental and about 40 that are? why?

[Marcia]

>why?

Not enough links and/or not enough PR. Also look at the site navigation to route whatever link love there is to the most important pages.

[Webnauts]

Reasons of going into supplemental results:

1. Duplicated Content.
2. Pages with no content.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.
4. Error pages.
5. Pages with canonicalization problems.
6. Suspicious pages for spamming, spam indexing, i.e as linking to bad neighborhoods, hidden text, etc.

[wingslevel]

>Not enough links and/or not enough PR

That is my point, it's not about just good content anymore - we are into full scale pr wars. why do you think everybody is buying pr links like they are going out of style? look at the serps on competitive commercial keywords - amazon, shopzilla, dealtime etc. - the new importance of pr in the algo is hurting relevance - my serps are filled with crap - the good content relevant pages are getting squashed by the big pr boys.

[Pirates]

Current update about link is king. Its a bunch of crap any benefit or drop your seeing I would hope is temporary as later google must clean up these results. Or I'll have to spend the next six months reporting spam.

[Reno]

the new importance of pr in the algo is hurting relevance - my serps are filled with crap - the good content relevant pages are getting squashed by the big pr boys.

Bullseye -- an acute observation that, for whatever reason, the software engineers at Google do not appear to grasp.

.....................................

[Whoa]

In one fell swoop at Pubcon, Matt explained it with crystal clarity:

Your pages are supplemental because you don't have enough inbound links to those pages. Get more links to those pages and you will likely no longer be supplemental.

Thanks, Matt!

[edited by: Whoa at 3:43 am (utc) on Nov. 19, 2006]

[Adam_Lasnik]

Just to refine that a bit... it's about the quality, not quantity of links.

Pages are in the supplemental results because we still wanted to be able to show them to users, but the pages didn't have enough PageRank to make it into our main index (which is more extensive and updated with greater frequency).

Getting more *quality* backlinks is generally a good way to get more of your pages in the main index.

[photopassjapan]

Yeah... that, and/or simply fixing your internal navigation.
If you already have quality backlinks and don't know why your site still seems "unimportant" :P