Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
Or have the delisted pages come back?
I ask to decide whether to find fault in all my suplimental pages (even though they are a year out of date and don't represent how they look now) or wait to see which pages come back into the index. I don't want to make unnecesary changes just because G is broken.
Or is supplimentals here to stay and I need to review them now?
Does anyone know what to do to solve this problem?
For a page that goes 404 or the domain expires, Google keeps a copy of the very last version of the page that they saw, as a Supplemental Result and show it in the index when the number of other pages returned is low. The cached copy will be quite old.
For a normal site, the current version of the page should be in the normal index, and the previous version of the page is held in the Supplemental index.
If you use search terms that match the current content, then you see that current content in the title and snippet, in the cache, and on the live page.
If you search for terms that were only on the old version of the page, then you see those old search terms in the title and snippet, even though they are not in the cache, nor found on the live page. That result will be marked as Supplemental.
There are also supplemental results where the result is for duplicate content of whatever Google considers to be the "main" site. These results seemingly hang around forever, with an old cache, a cache that often no longer reflects what is really on the page right now. Usually there is no "normal" result for that duplicate URL - just the old Supplemental, based on the old data. On the other hand, the "main" URL will usually have both a normal result and a Supplemental result (but not always).
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Right now I see some interesting bugs in the Supplemental logic.
site:domain.com inurl:www brings 98000 www pages all with a recent cache.
site:domain.com -inurl:www brings 24000 www pages (even though the search says to exclude all www pages) all of them marked as Supplemental and all showing a cache date of almost a year ago.
That should not be happening.
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Add to that the pages with meta robots noindex tags on them that have been indexed and cached, and are showing as Supplemental Results with a cache from 2005 June or July, and Google has a bit of a problem on their hands right now.
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Oh, and searches with a hyphen in them are not fixed either. Search for an email address with a hyphen in it. See what results you get. Search again, replacing the hyphen with a space and see that thousands of supplemental pages appear from nowhere - all for pages that have (or had) the email address printed on them at some time.
Mark
Supplimentals: Do they come back?
its one of the great anomloies of our time that so many academics end up coding a search engine that will deem pages and sites that have not exsisted for a year or more worth serving to the end user..i can understand that the page is deemed relevant on its last known content..but what part of the algo does not consider if it actually exsists or not and serves it before even the updated version of the same page...
Interesting point on site:example.com inurl:www and site:example.com -inurl:www
On site:example.com inurl:www I have for the first time 72 pages with NO SUPPLEMENTAL RESULTS.
On site:example.com -inurl:www I have still have 103 with lots of Supplemental Results...
I hope tha means Google is getting close to fix it.
Thank you for the feedback.
<Sorry, no site specifcs.
See Forum Charter [webmasterworld.com]>
[edited by: tedster at 1:51 am (utc) on July 3, 2006]
Yes. Supplementals come back over and over again.
<<< Or have the delisted pages come back? >>>
Yes. Delisted pages keep coming back, going away, coming back, and going away again.
It appears that Google is stuck halfway through the year 2005.
Every time their engineers try to get past that time period it only lasts for a day or two, then they fall back on their outdated supplemental index.
The last 3 months have been like watching The Little Engine That Couldn't.
We will all rejoice when the Engine finally makes it over the hill.
The update lasted exactly for one day..
On June 25 everything went back to the way it was, 30 pages of our site indexed, the rest, 500 supplemental.
Could someone help us on this, guide us in the right direction, so we can get fully indexed again?
