Supplemental and direct link juice

[onetry]

I noticed that to go out from supplemental it is not enough to obtain good link juice to an internal page AND from that point link to page that has to go in main index.

GOOD BL --> my page supplemental : it works, in main index
GOOD BL --> my page in main index with few outbound --> my page supplemental :DOES NOT WORK

It does not make sense to me.

Any help or impression?

Regards.

[rainborick]

Uniqueness also seems to play a role in whether or not a page is relegated to the Supplemental Index. That is, pages that are heavy with template content or share <title> and <meta> tags with several other pages within a site are more likely to be in the Supplemental Index. Its also possible that freshness could be a factor given Google's recent penchant for evaluating that aspect of a page, but I have no evidence of it yet.

[Halfdeck]

"GOOD BL --> my page in main index with few outbound --> my page supplemental :DOES NOT WORK"

That's partly because a direct link to a supplemental page flows more PageRank than a link to a page in the main index linking to a supplemental page.

BTW, freshness is definitely a factor. Dave Crow from Google's crawl team confirmed it. Matt Cutts also mentioned that url complexity is a factor as well.

Interestingly, all those factors are related to crawl efficiency. PageRank says crawl high PageRank "sites" deeper and more often (yes I know PageRank is attributed to a page), and use less resources on unpopular sites. Freshness says don't crawl a static page over and over again, and URL complexity prevents Googlebot from deep crawling a site to infinity.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 8:29 pm (utc) on Aug. 20, 2007]

[JohnRoy]

url complexity is a factor as well.

_{(If it's not too complex...)}
can you please define the term "url complexity".

[Halfdeck]

URL with "too many" query strings? Google didn't elaborate, but here's a direct quote:

The supplemental index made it possible to index even more web pages and, just like our main web index, make this content available when generating relevant search results for user queries. This was especially useful for queries that did not return many results from the main web index, and for these the supplemental index allowed us to query even more web pages. The fewer constraints we're able to place on sites we crawl for the supplemental index means that web pages that are not in the main web index could be included in the supplemental. These are often pages with lower PageRank or those with more complex URLs. Thus the supplemental index (read more - and here's Matt's talk about it on video) serves a very important purpose: to index as much of the relevant content that we crawl as possible.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 3:01 am (utc) on Aug. 24, 2007]

[tedster]

FYI, here's the link for that quote:

[googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com...]

[onetry]

BTW, freshness is definitely a factor. Dave Crow from Google's crawl team confirmed it. Matt Cutts also mentioned that url complexity is a factor as well.

What is freshness?

- freshness in little frequent changes (move h1 from one point to another, little modify in title)
- freshness in content

About url complexity I deal with it; my urls are all .htm pages

Regards.

[HarryM]

I suspect another factor is Google's perception of what the page is about. If a page is optimized for "KW1 KW2 KW3" where KW1 KW2 KW3 is a term that is rarely searched for, the page may be tagged as supplemental even though it is a perfectly valid page.

Google's patents on semantic units may play a part in the decision. Google might recognize "KW1 KW3" as a semantic unit, but not "KW1 KW2 KW3".

[SEOPTI]

I don't think the long tail plays a role.

[Tonearm]

That's interesting Harry. Have you noticed a similar pattern on your site(s)?

[HarryM]

Tonearm,

Yes, I have one particular page that used to be #1 in serps and bring in traffic. It's about a relatively obscure tourist attraction in China - KW KW2 KW3. A few months ago it went supplemental and disappeared from serps, and all that showed was a similar Wikipedia page, folowed by pages that had the keywords but in differing orders or spaced out within the text. But a search in quotes "KW1 KW2 KW3" would show it as #1. I assume putting the term in quotes invoked the supplementary index.

Lately the situation has improved with the page now showing in the first 10 in serps for a normal search, presumably because Google has improved it's handling of supplementary pages.

Yet it's still well below where I would expect it to be, considering that as far as I know it and the Wiki pages are the only pages in English about the subject.

But I admit it's not a lot of evidence on which to bas a theory. :)

[g1smd]

Google must have a method of detecting "fake freshness" too. Take a forum, and look at the pages that list the threads. Take a look at page 15 for example. Tommorow all those posts will be on page 16 because of all the new ones added (on page one). Nothing will have changed with the posts that are many weeks and months old. To detect those as "fresh" would be untrue.

There are many other parallel examples.