Whats a good supplemental index ratio these days?

[AjiNIMC]

Whats a good supplemental index ratio these days? Whats the effect on ranking as supplement is not all that bad these day? WebmasterWorld has 25.99% (which is very good), cnn has 81.7%, about.com has 64.03%.

AjiNIMC

[SEOPTI]

I also see only 25% of WebmasterWorld URLs are supplemental. A good ratio is a ratio where you get traffic.

[AjiNIMC]

A good ratio is a ratio where you get traffic

:), well said but just wanted to handle things a little more carefully for a little more stable future.

[rekitty]

What's the preferred method for finding out your number of supplemental pages vs. pages in the main index these days?

[tedster]

1. Do a site:example.com search on google.com - that gives you the total number of pages indexed, regular and supplemental.

2. Do the same search on aol.com - that gives you only the regular index urls.

Or, you can also do a search for site:example.com/* on google.com. That syntax currently gives you only the regular index urls as well.

[Asia_Expat]

I've got around 450 pages in the regular index, which is about 10 percent. I get around 340 uniques from Google per day. My domain is about 20 months old.

I'm dissatisfied with this of course and working hard to improve this.

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 10:55 am (utc) on Jan. 14, 2008]

[AjiNIMC]

Here is what I am doing

site:example.com -site:example.com/* this shows me a lot of pages that are termed supplement. What steps do I take to minimize it a little bit (just for some satisfaction)

1. get more links to these pages (Does interlinking also helps here?)
   
2. Simplify the URL structure
   
3. Add a bit of content to it. (Does adding unique meta kws and desc helps too?)
   
4. Delete similar kind of pages.
   
5. What else?
   

[edited by: AjiNIMC at 7:14 am (utc) on Jan. 15, 2008]

[icedowl]

do a search for site:example.com/* on google.com

I tried that and my results are frightening for my 8 year old site. It's showing under 2% of my pages as not supplemental, assuming that is what the results really are. The only good information I've seen lately is that the site's backlinks have increased by a factor of 5. Overall, I'm about to simply give up on G ever giving my site decent results or traffic. It's just so disappointing and frustrating after all these years of working at building a completely white hat and clean, pure content site. I'm just beside myself and don't know what to do other than to just continue doing my thing as best I see fit.

[Jane_Doe]

Zero percent supplemental is good.

[SEOPTI]

The supplemental index still stinks, there is not a single website with more than 20 URLs which has 0% supplementals.

[AjiNIMC]

The supplemental index still stinks, there is not a single website with more than 20 URLs which has 0% supplementals.

The bigger your website, the bigger the ratio (most of the time) except some good managed sites like WebmasterWorld has lesser.

AjiNIMC

[AjiNIMC]

Also what I see is that it is not that much about duplicate content. I have a long blog post (around 1000 words, a lot of outgoing/outbound links) which is very useful and unique but still under supplement.

It looks like it is (MOSTLY) related to how many incoming links/PR a website has, the more incoming links the more is the value of your site, the more your value .. more number of pages will be indexed and included in main index.

AjiNIMC

[wingslevel]

let's face it, there are lots of factors than can lead to pages getting into the supp index - dup content, internal linking problems etc., but the biggest thing is raw page rank - it can fix a lot of problems.

if your site is pr3, and you have the most amazing original content on each of your 5,000 pages, LOL

on my ecommerce site with 30,000 pages and 89% supp, I have slowed down adding new products - unless I can get to PR7 on my home page, they'll just end up in the supps anyway

the sad irony is that google started off being so successful by giving the user such relevant results - now when you search google, you are getting so many wiki/amazon/shopzilla that the really good stuff just isn't coming up - who wants to search google to get a wiki listing? just go there yourself - i blame the supps for this decline in google relevance and value to the searcher.

[koan]

I don't get this supplemental stuff. I thought Google prided itself for indexing the most amount of pages on the web and having unlimited disk space (which they freely give away with gmail and other free services). Why all stingy all of a sudden?

[AjiNIMC]

I am still not sure about all these stuffs as I was a little away from SEO. I saw that some of my pages are out of supplement after I changed the template, made the template less and content more.

I am still testing few things :)

AjiNIMC

[Halfdeck]

"if your site is pr3, and you have the most amazing original content on each of your 5,000 pages, LOL"

Exactly.

The exact ratio doesn't matter. Compare:

1. A TBPR 5 site with 10,000 pages and 900 pages in the main index, or 9%

2. A TBPR 3 site with 10 pages, 9 pages in the main index, or 90%

90% in the main index, therefore, is obviously not necessarily better than 9%. What I look at is how many pages you have in the main index.

----

There are several factors you need to look at:

- how many indexable pages you have. If you have 100,000 pages you can split PageRank in too many little bits and have a ton of pages go supplemental.

- internal link structure. If you have sitewide links, that can create a situation where 10-20 pages have a lot of pagerank and the rest of the site are supplemental.

- Backlinks. Supplemental issue is, at the end of the day, mostly about lack of PageRank. But if you gain backlinks the wrong way (e.g. excessive reciprocal linking) that can devalue inbound juice to your domain, and create supplemental problems (addressed by matt cutts in response to a forbes' article about Google Hell).

- Page freshness and URL complexity. Two factors Dave Crow from Google's crawl team mentioned that also can turn pages supplemental.

[edited by: Halfdeck at 1:09 pm (utc) on Jan. 26, 2008]