what exactly are 'supplementals'?

what does it mean?

[Tearabite]

i've seen a lot this week about being listed as 'supplemental' .. but, what does that mean?

[finer9]

When you do a site:www.site.com search on Google, some of the listings say 'Supplemental Result' near the 'Cached' text...apparently when pages are listed as supplemental, they dont get as much traffic essentially.

[bobmark]

There is also a much deadlier aspect tho I don't think anyone knows exactly how the process works.

Basically too many supplemtals and you get most all of your site PR0'd which happened to a lot of sites in jagger.

What nobody seems to know is if its some kind of "supplemental threshhold" (like if 40% of your pages are supplemental you get PR0'd) OR if its some kind of penalty where Google PR0's you and your pages turn supplemtal in subsequent indexes.

Whatever the cause, if it happens to yu kiss anything better than #999 in the SERP's goodbye for months.

[moftary]

Whatever the cause, if it happens to yu kiss anything better than #999 in the SERP's goodbye for months.

Correction: forever.

[watercrazed]

I have over 4x the number of pages in supplemental than I have in the main index. 3000 to 14,000. Rank ok on the non supplemental pages. But during the big daddy I was in supplemental hell all was supplemental except the homepage. All better now.

[rkhare]

Whatever the cause, if it happens to yu kiss anything better than #999 in the SERP's goodbye for months.

Correction: forever.

ok so problem is that severe, now i understand why gg intervened, this question was puzzling me since i saw gg post.

thanks gg, atleast now i know that you are watching everything about google like almighty god and ready to take corrective measures

[caveman]

> forever

Just an FYI: It's not necessarily forever. We've gotten our own sites out of hot water, and helped some clients' sites too.

I can also tell you for a fact that there are sites out there that -- even with a substantial majority of pages in the Supp's -- still have "healthy" pages that are ranking fine. It may be the exception, but it exists.

Like all things with G, it's not a simple thing.

[Wally_Books]

I have a 5000+ supplemental pages that aren't even listed in a site:www.site.com search, let alone a real search. The only way I know they are there is a specfic search looking for them individually

[afterburner]

I think we all need to look into the mirror and be honest with ourselves. My experience with Supp`s is that the only pages I own that have Supp`s are pages that are doorway pages and/or machine generated mumbo jumbo. All the sites I own that are legit and are hand made are not listed as Supp`s. Just my 2 cents.

[Miop]

All my supps have session ID's attached (the spiders file was missing from the installation).
These pages have not been spidered since August 05 now - problem is, that they werw still 'there'.
A couple of months ago I actually moved the entire shop site into a different directory so that G would find those pages 'missing' if Gbot came, but I can't get it to come. It hits the index page and gives up.

[annej]

All the sites I own that are legit and are hand made are not listed as Supp`s. Just my 2 cents.

I have pages listed as supplimental because I deleted them. Google made them supplimental and once there it doesn't seem there is anything you can do to get Google to figure out they are listing pages as supplimental that simply don't exist. I know a lot of other people have this same problem.

There are a lot of pages listed as supplimental that have nothing to do with black hat SEO.

[chewy]

I think there is another type of "supplemental" and that is where you have just a file name listed for more than half the pages...

What would you call this?

For the site I'm tracking, of about 40 pages, about the first 10 are looking good (with cached and similar pages tags showing - also good, recent cache dates).

Most of this first group ranks well on keywords and phrases like before.

at about # 9, the green "- supplemental result -" tag shows up. From #9 down, everything appears to have an older cache date.

Then after 2 more pages below(with a nice https 404 in there at # 12) all heck breaks loose. (Yes the https looks problematical but it was never a problem before - and it is really 404!)

In the remaining 2 dozen plus, there's a couple of pages that look good but have June 05 cache dates, and the rest of the SERP is just file names(www.sitename.com/pagename.htm)... I can't get cache dates but my assumption is they are older dated pages.

There is some accidental duplicate content on some of these older pages as the original pages had the same title or description, or lacking a description, the snippet was the top of the page link structure but this shouldn't matter, right?

What do you call those pages that are below supplemental and not marked?