Whats the Skinny on Supplemental index

Adam from google clarifies some issues

[contentwithcontent]

From Adams post at the Google webmaster discussion group...

"I thought I'd clear the air a bit:

1) Penalty?
When your site has pages in our supplemental index, it does *not*
indicate that your site has been penalized. In particular, we do not
move a site's pages from our main to our supplemental index in response to any violations of our Webmaster Guidelines.

2) Freshness?
You can expect to see a fresher supplemental index in the coming
quarters. By the definition of "supplemental," however, I don't forsee
it becoming as comprehensive or frequently updated as our main index.

3) Cure?
Get more quality backlinks. This is a key way that our algorithms will
view your pages as more valuable to retain in our main index."

more at... Google Groups discussion [groups.google.com]

[edited by: tedster at 11:12 pm (utc) on Nov. 11, 2006]
[edit reason] fix side-scroll [/edit]

[Staffa]

Well block them then. Or do you actually WANT the traffic? Well then do what you have to to get it!

With listings in supplemental there is NO traffic. G is already blocked access to a couple of sites and if the trend continues will be blocked to all sites.

Time better spent finding other venues for traffic then bending over backwards to try and suit G.

[texasville]

>>>>>>>to say bigger companies are less relevant to the searches they target i.e. they are less able to provide the services people are looking for? I don't think so.<<<<<

Are you saying smaller companies are?

>>>>>In fact I think precisely the opposite. They are successful because they are good at what they do<<<<<<

Sometimes...and sometimes they USED to be good at what they do. Now they just have deep pockets and can do on the internet what smaller can't.
Why do you care? Was I bullying big companies?

[fishfinger]

No; but the comments I quoted indicate that you and others think it somehow unfair that money has to be spent on internet marketing and that only 'the big boys' can be expected to have a budget for this.

I disagree with what appears to me an unrealistic attitude.

And yes I think that smaller less successful companies are likely to be less good at what they do. That's why they are smaller and less successful!

[Staffa]

smaller less successful companies

Smaller is not a synonym for less successful.
Niche companies can be very successful but they are still small, that's why they are 'niche'.

[texasville]

>>>>>>And yes I think that smaller less successful companies are likely to be less good at what they do. That's why they are smaller and less successful!<<<<<<

At one time google was the smallest, least well known search engine out there. Lucky for them, there wasn't an entity around capable of quashing them and keeping them irrelevant.

[Gissit]

Staffa - 'smaller' is surely less succesful than 'bigger' in the same marketplace. If 'bigger' also supplies to niche then niche is not niche.
If 'bigger' does not supply to niche then 'smaller' is not 'smaller', merely small as he is not competing with 'bigger' and should not be compared to him in this context. (if you get what I mean...)

Anyway, back to topic, I think there maybe other ways to land in the supplementals.

I have another site that is largely supplemental and does not suffer with duplicate content from errant URL's. This is a relatively new site (8 months) and has a large number of pages (7500+).

It is difficult to explain the structure of the site without to much detail but the simplest way is to think of it as a wanted item site, where a user submits a small amount of unique data (Typ <60 characters) and this is then listed. There is an index type page with 50 user entries and each of these has a link to a page that contains the same text but with an ability for someone else to reply & some more detail (this is invisible to Google as much of the extra content will not appear until logged in). The index type page also contains further links to other index pages (page 1, 2, 3 etc).

As the site grew the number of links to other index pages reached page 120 or so and we ended up with pages containing 175+ navigation links to pages containing near dupe content (the detail pages) and other index pages (page 1,2,3 etc) that contained more dupes and more index pages etc... I think this is what caused much of the site to go supplemental.

Most of the detail pages and all but one of the index pages are listed supplemental. All the standard content is in the main index (about us, links, normal content etc)

I have now put a noindex on all the detail pages and changed the index page navigation to only show links to upto 10 other pages and am waiting with baited breath to see if (and when) we get forgiven.

[edited by: Gissit at 6:22 pm (utc) on Nov. 15, 2006]

[fishfinger]

Niche companies can be very successful but they are still small, that's why they are 'niche'.

then they shouldn't have to worry about being squeezed out of the search results then should they?

Oh, unless there are 'big boys' with 'deep pockets' in their niche :)

[fishfinger]

At one time google was the smallest, least well known search engine out there

Yes, but it was the best (until everyone figured out how it worked). That's why it's succeeded - it offered something new.

[Gissit]

Yes, but it was the best (until everyone figured out how it worked). That's why it's succeeded - it offered something new.

And back then I expect people were complaining about not listing at the top of Yahoo etc.

If someone could genuinely build something better and market it better than G then, even today, it could grow to overtake the big boys.

Then in ten years when it held a monopoly on the market someone would start a thread on here claiming that their site should rank higher than Johnny's but doesn't because (insert - big long list of gripes) and that <besteversearchengine.com> was manipulating the results to please its shareholders and should listen to the webmasters cos they know best and it is their web anyway

[piconsulting]

At pubcon today, Cutts specifically stated that a lack of PageRank causes URLs to go supplemental.

[photopassjapan]

...

Okay than please re-read my first post on this thread.

For that's what i said right from the start :P

( /me takes pills against long-windedness in time for a change )

[joergnw10]

We launched a site about 3 months ago. First only the home page was indexed.
A couple of weeks age those pages linked to from the homepage went into the regular index (some also have links from external sites), so I hoped that finally things got moving.
Yesterday a bunch of pages from the second level went into the index - all supplemental. These are mainly articles & reviews especially written for this site - so no duplicate content.
Actually most of the main content of the site is on this level, so this is quite frustrating.
I wonder why Google even bothered to index these pages at all, they might as well just have carried on ignoring them instead of putting them straight into the supplemental index.?

[g1smd]

I see a forum that generates more than 300 URLs (across several domains) for a single 10-post thread. The URLs included have a thread ID or multiple message IDs (one for each post) and each of those can have other added parameters too.

Google indexed about 30% of the possible URLs for the thread, and then dumped more than 90% of what they had indexed to supplemental after a few weeks.

When I previously looked (about a week ago) a lot of the duplicates were at that time, shown as URL-only entries on some datacentres.

Now I see them as supplemental.

[Halfdeck]

A recent post published a few minutes ago by Adam Lasnik on the same thread, regarding PageRank, internal linking and the supplemental index:

We list bazillions of pages in our main index that have no external
backlinks; PageRank can flow *within* a site. While it's super to get
links to internal pages from admiring fans, it's not a requirement in
order for those deep pages to appear in the main index.

This, by the way, doesn't mean that you should go *hog wild* with
internal crosslinking (it'll only confuse your users and fail to
provide any additional ranking benefits), but it's a great idea to have
a regular sitemap and/or reasonable Web of related links within your
own site. That's not just good for Google, it's good for your users...
because they can then (ideally) find any page/product/service on your
site.

Google Groups link [groups.google.com]

[edited by: encyclo at 11:20 pm (utc) on Nov. 20, 2006]
[edit reason] fixed link [/edit]

[JoeHouse]

Can title tags cause your site to go supplemental as well?

I had some rtml programming done in which my title tags would use the main category if fell under in the title

For examle:

let's say I have a website selling cars

Lets say I have a category called "Used Cars"

Now lets say under used cars there are 100 pages and my title on my pages read like this.

Ford Truck - Used Cars
Honda - Used Cars
Toyota - Used Cars

You get the idea. My question is this. Will my pages go supplemental because my title tags keep repeating the word "Used Cars" for those 100 pages? Or is this ok?

If not, what would be the correct way to write these title tags?

[tedster]

JoeHouse, that looks fine to me. In my experience, as long as you actually change the title (and meta description) to make it appropriate, unique and relevant for the individual page, and don't re-use some generic version on lots of pages, then you are not courting Supplemental/duplicate problems from this direction.

[photopassjapan]

It's okay.

Meta and title does not make your pages supplemental anyway.
Omitted, yes.
But not supplemental.

But even for omitted they need to be identical.

[JoeHouse]

Here is the thing

Many sites that have top ranking on Google in my industry show no duplicate title or description tags. With all being equal in my title tags on my product pages all include category name in title where they came from.

So if I have 100 items in that category the item and the category name get displayed as the title tag and as a result 100 of which are using the same keyword.

So I am putting 2 + 2 together and seeing my competitors who are not doing this are getting top rankings and my site is all supplemental.

Also I have been reading on other forums that repeated title tags in this matter CAN possibly cause supplemental problems.

So is it better to be on the safe side and remove these repeat title tags? It wouldn't hurt if I remove this, right?

[g1smd]

What do you mean by "remove"?

Your page should always have a title tag in it. It is one of the most important tags on the page.

[JoeHouse]

I think something positive may be happening. Hoping someone who reads this can confirm.

Except for the homepage my entire website is in Supplemental Index.

About two weeks ago I made the recommended changes that I have read on this forum to try and get out of the supplemental index on Google.

Here is what I have noticed in the last two weeks after my changes:

when I did a search as "site:mydomain.com" Before my changes to the website I had 689 pages indexed all supplemental. Since that time and after my changes I now have 1850 pages index but again all supplemental except for the homepage.

Can I take this as a positive sign that Google is crawling my site more and grabing more pages even though they are still being place in supplemental?

Keep in mind my site is about 1 year old.....I had title tag issues and also duplicate content issues which all have been corrected two weeks back.

Can I assume that google is preparing to send me back to the main index?

Does anybody have any experience with this? Is is this a clear sign that I may be getting out?