Forum Moderators: Robert Charlton & goodroi
So I experimented with site: /directory/ and a +keyword and lo, those missing pages show up as the extra search option at the end of the serps.
Than I tried site: /directory/ with an * after the slash, and I was back to the original, 100% number of my pages.
I've re-re-re-read the supplemental topics in the lib here, but am still confounded. Do I have a 30% supplemental situation? Can I use the "perform this search" option to discover what is supplemental?
And lastly: is there really such a state of being as 'supplemental' anymore?
Thanks.
I still like to do the the site: operator query on a partner site, such as AOL. The results are usually a good bit lower than I get on google.com itself - and I can only assume that urls they choose not to feed to a partner are considered second-rate in some way or other.
Sometimes, if you collect a group of these omitted urls you sometimes can see a pattern that you can address -- thin content, near duplicate titles and descriptions, very deeply siloed, etc. But sometimes there's little you can see or do about it.
We really have only guesswork as to what the various search hacks such as /* will return these days. I just checked one site and I see:
site:example.com -- 1690 urls
site:example.com/* -- 1120 urls
-- On AOL --
site:example.com -- 1620 urls
That's nothing you can take to the bank, is it?
I mention this because Tedster (I think it was tedster) has been commenting that he suspects somethings going on in the index back end. I agree.
Check the Hot Topics area [webmasterworld.com], which is always pinned to the top of this forum's index page. There are some key discussions in there about the Supplemental Index that will bring you up to speed on the topic.
site:www.example.com/*
will give you a list of your non-supplemental pages.
-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com
will give you a list of your supplemental pages.
Example.com appears to spam Google badly in this regard.
Note: for many of these searches you must hit
"repeat the search with the omitted results included" or add "&filter=0" to the search URL.
If you use Google Webmaster tools and look at:
"Pages with internal links"
you will only find non-supplemental pages listed here.
Supplemental pages can rank well in the SERPS these days, but I would say their content is not fully indexed.
An example:
To track scrapers I add a unique string to all pages of a given site, such as "GoogADFGHVCS", a string guaranteed not to originally be in the Google Index.
I find when I add this unique string, the only pages that show up in a site search such as this:
site:www.example.com GoogADFGHVCS
ONLY non-supplemental pages will be listed in the result.
Google does not index the entire content of a "supplemental" page, BUT they sure do index all correctly spelled "real" words. I can search for a unique sentence on the site and Google will return a supplemental page with that sentence.
I do one thing that may well make more of my pages supplemental and that is putting a unique string in all my Titles. Again something like GoogUniqAABBCC; actually shorter. If I do a site search with this string:
site:www.example.com GoogUniqAABBCC
Google returns all pages, supplemental and non-supplemental. So Google apparently always indexes the entire Title's content.
are you sure about it?
That sounds like something that I said about 3 or 4 months ago.
I do see something very close to that pattern, quite often. There might be other factors involved, and it might just be a coincidence.
Am I sure about the webmaster tools correlation? Can you be sure about anything with Google? It could change tomorrow, and yesterday too!
All I can say is, there is a surprising numerical correlation.
Also historically, when Google was indicating "supplemental" in the SERPs, there was excellent correlation between the "supplemental test" and the supplemental indicator in the SERPs. Of course back in that period supplementals rarely showed in the search results; then it was a true curse on the page.
I do remember a period for a few weeks last year (?) where the "supplemental test" failed to work at all, but its functionality did return.
Just another note: The Google tool bar does not show page rank (grayed out) for supplemental pages!
This observation has been posted here in the past as well. So perhaps supplemental pages are not included in the page rank calculation? (Who knows?!)
Finally, this is just a total guess but, it may be that supplemental pages will tend to only rank well in searches using three or more terms. Of course Page Rank is a major factor here as well.
BUT, the most important factor in Google search results ranking is ...... (No, its not inbound links!)
I'm noticing when I look at supplemental pages for my sites, that many no longer have a cache link in the SERPs. At least in the past you could tell how long ago Google crawled your supplemental pages by looking at the cached date. Now many do not have links.
I don't see any dropout in caching non-supplemental files. I've noticed this for several weeks now. Coincidentally today, I've seen a major drop in Supplementals returned; this could just be a normal transient. I have seen dropouts before, but not the caching quirk.
Anybody seeing the same thing?
Supplemental test:
-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com
(Have you noticed example.com seems to spam Google? Perhaps these are inbound "example" links from the entire world)
Non-supplemental test:
site:www.example.com/*
[edited by: Robert_Charlton at 5:33 pm (utc) on Mar. 22, 2009]
