Do supplemental pages ever get out and into index?

supplemental results

[vinstr]

Hello all
I have a webesite which is 2-3 years old. I always had HORRIBLE search results and after doing lots of reading realized how poorly my pages were set up. Google had at one time indexed about 1000 pages of my site but all except the home page were put into supplemental results because I had only a few links into my site and most of my pages were using images for text so they looked almost toatlly blank.
Well about a month or two ago I really went nuts and updated my entire site, and now it is very nicely optimized and has many more links due to an aggressive link campaign. YAHOO and MSN have picked it up nicely and alot of my main pages are indexed. Google is another story....
All the supplemetal results were last cached in March or April and Google was only reindexing my home page and does that regularly. BUT it never went through my site to even look at all those other pages (I guess it just assumed they were still blank.) But then, a few weeks ago, I checked and it had INDEXED ALL MY IMPORTANT PAGES and most of the other 1000 pages! I was so psyched and the important pages, were ranking well in Serches,too! I thought all was well- but then the next day I did another SITE: search and everything was back to the way it was before: Only my home page indexed and all those old supplemental results from March...And nothing coming up in searches at all?
Its like it just overnight got rid of all the new index/spidered pages and put back the old supplemental result...And now it is still the same except for 3 newer pages that are indexed and were not around in MARCH and had no previous index...
Does anyone have any idea why this happened and are all those old pages doomed to stay in the suplemental results, even though I updated them? And why would Google revert back to earlier versions of those pages with no content? Some of them have inbound links...my PR is only 3 but should be growing as my inlinks are
Thnaks in adavance!

[tedster]

Hello vinstr, and welcome to the forumss.

First, if you haven't already, I suggest you study this thread: Supplemental Results: What exactly are they? [webmasterworld.com]

The basic answer is yes, urls can gain a place in the "regular" index even after being tagged as Supplemental. But Google will not spider Supplemental URLs nearly as frequently as others, so even after a fix is in place, more patience is needed.

The other issue you raise is probably related to this: Google uses many different data centers and their data are not the same. Sounds like you first may have seen results from a newer data set and then it switched back. But after 2-3 years of next to nothing from Google, that glimmer of hope is probably an indicator that something good can happen for you.

Watch your logs for Google Search referers most of all - in a world where different people get different results, that's what counts the most.

[g1smd]

If a URL is Supplemental because it is a duplicate of some other URL serving the same content, then cleaning up the duplicates allows one of those URLs to return to the main index.

The clean up involves using redirects or noindex tags for all the alternative URLs. These remain tagged as Supplemental for one year and then they are dropped.

[vinstr]

Thanks very much for the replys! And I am so glad I found these forums, they have already been a huge help!
The results were definitely not duplicate results, its just that most of them had almost nothing on the pages (from the search engine point of view) as they were almost all images.
And I hope you are right about the different data centers, and yes it is a bit of hope after going years with nothing. Google is so frustrating and slow in their updates that I cannot be sure if my changes are working/helping...but I guess I just need more patience...

[g1smd]

To quote a well known speaker at SEO conferences:

"Search engines
- index text, and
- follow links."

You need to provide search engines with what they want.

[vinstr]

Great Quote!
And I know that know, but I was just worried that it was too late and Google just thinks all my pages are blank and useless so it stopped looking at them since they probably crwled them a bunch if times over the past 2-3 years and it was always blank. So now I need them to look at it again and get rid of the old results...
And it seems like at least one data center did update it, but none of the others, so I can only hope that hey do too...

[hermosa]

Yes absolutely. I re-organized one section of my site and moved wording from one page to another. For a while one of the pages went supplemental. Also, I had to really clean up the wording and take any overlap in content and put it on a new seperate page. Within weeks, it was fine.

[Marcia]

I've seen pages go Supplemental, without duplication being a problem, on sites that simply don't have enough "value" from enough inbound links and PageRank.

There's also a matter of what appears to be redundancy causing some pages to go Supplemental, which is not the same thing as duplication or near-duplication.

[reseller]

Hi Folks

I see Matt Cutts posted yesterday a reply [mattcutts.com] which mightbe of relevance to this thread:

...., PageRank is the primary factor determining whether a url is in the main web index vs. the supplemental results, so I’d concentrate on good backlinks more than worrying about varying page layouts, etc.

Thoughts?