Is Being Supplemental a Problem?

Is it a Google error, or is it that the pages are of less value?

[Eazygoin]

I have noticed a number of people, including myself, who have seen most of their pages go supplemental, but does it mean they will be pushed further down the SERP's?

Google says it doesn't affect page rank, but that the pages do not meet certain criteria to be indexed in the main index.

GG/Matt Cutts asked for feedback by email some 6 weeks or more back, but no remedy has been seen, neither have they responded/replied.

Perhaps it is an error at Google. Perhaps the new infrastructure will take care of it in time. Perhaps it will stay that way. Perhaps it's not important!

However, it would be nice to get some clue as to the progress/ lack of progress from Google. Even if they say 'it's not a problem, so don't worry about it!

[tedster]

Not affecting PageRank and not affecting ranking in the SERPs are two different issues. The current moment with Google is not according to any past patterns, so it's very hard to give a defnintive answer. I am seeing more Supplemental urls showing up in the first run of a SERP rather than just in omitted results - so maybe it doesn't matter as much as it used to, but somehow I doubt that.

Two questions come to mind: How has your traffic been affected? ...and can you see any reason why these urls are supplemental, such as dupe titles and descriptions, or another url (including any query string) can access essentially the same page?

[Eazygoin]

tedster>>

It doesn't seem to affect traffic in any way whatsoever.

But one observation I notice is that if I do a site: search, all but 3 SERP's listings are supplemental. Yet when I search an individual keyword, the result shows up as non-supplemental. This makes me believe that the site: search is not to be taken too seriously.

The site has a menu of categories on every product related page. These lead to sub-cat pages when clicked on any particular category. As for dupe content, there isn't any!

In conclusion, it's not affecting the site, but more from an interest point of view, I wondered why Google has decided to show so many supps for so many people [ from what I have read on this forum ]

[texasville]

>>>>It doesn't seem to affect traffic in any way whatsoever.<<<<
I beg to disagree. When BD hit my site, at one point only my index page and one page that I wrote about doing maintenance on one particular product remained as not supplemental. I figured it was getting enough traffic and had it's own backlinks from being referenced around the web that it had escaped the bd axe as all the rest of my information articles had gone supplemental. I was still getting a few hits a day from google on this page.
Then a couple of weeks ago..boom...it went supplemental and now gets NO google traffic. It doesn't return in the first 1000 and used to return in top ten.
Still gets plenty of msn and yahoo but NO google. Traffic is very much affected by being supplental.

[tedster]

Interesting -- apparently there is more than one "supplemental scenario" going on. At least one report is that no traffic problem ensued, and another report is that traffic suffered greatly. So we are not talking about just one phenomenon.

[g1smd]

There are many types of Supplemental Result:

- There is the non-www Supplemental result where the www version of the same page is showing as a fully indexed normal result. This type is splitting PR and almost always having an effect on ranking. Some pages of the www site will be supplemental and some will be normal, and some pages of the non-www site will be supplemental and some will be normal. The cure is to add the 301 redirect, so that all the non-www pages are dropped.

- There is the Supplemental result that shows for a page that is now 404, or where the domain has expired. These are usually just clutter in the SERPs, especially for those where Google no longer has a cached copy of the page. Some do, some don't.

- There is the supplemental result that represents the previous version of the content on the page, where the current content appears as a normal result. That is, have a page with a phone number on it, and then alter that phone number. Do a search a few weeks later for both numbers. If you look for the new phone number, you see a normal result with the phone number in the snippet, and the cache also shows the new phone number. If you then look for the old phone number, you get the same page returned in the SERPs, but now with the old phone number in the snippet, but still pointing to a more modern cache that only shows the new phone number. This result appears as Supplemental. These are not affecting PR, but for a site where contact details, prices, etc have changed you have ample opportunity for surfers to be confused.

- There are the supplemental results that show when you have a site where many pages are classed as duplicate content of other pages on the same site. This occurs when the title and/or meta description and/or on-page content is too similar. The way to fix this is to make sure that every page has a unique title and description, and each page has different content. If you have a load of similar pages, use the <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag to keep all but one of them out of the search results.

- There may be other types, but there are often times when a site is hit by a combination of the above types.

[F_Rose]

IMO the supplemental results issue is being hit very hard now with BD switchover.
Our experience is as follows. We have redesigned our site for SEO purposes. I believe our site is very well optimized.
After the redesign most of our results when searching our site: where supplemental results. After a couple of weeks all of the s.r. where gone and google indexed our site regularly, they picked up most of our new url's within our redesigned site, we got rid of the old url's and s.r. We where doing great as far as traffic is concerned as well.
In the mid of April everything became black again. Google has most of our results (app. 600 url's) in s.r. They only got 24 pages listed from our new site.

What concerns me is, is G the one that caused and hopefully in the near future everything will go back to normal and thier is no need to worry, or is thier something we are doing wrong and that's why we are suffering?

Anyone that could respond with information, please do so, it would be greatly appreciated and I am sure lots of others with the same issue will benefit as well.

[Eazygoin]

texasville>>
"I beg to differ"

Sorry, but perhaps I should have made it clearer. What I meant was that it has not affected MY site in any way whatsoever :-)

g1smd>>

I don't have any www/non-www problem as the whole site shows as www only.

All URL's are unique, except the first three words say 'mysite' followed by the product name.

Today has been my best ever day since launching 18th April last year, and the logs show thousands of different URL's being hit. On checking some of them, none show as supplemental, although on doing a site:www.mydomain.com check, all but the first 3 show as supp. :-))