Do you know where your supplemental pages are?

[bumpski]

Google used to indicate a page's "supplemental index" status in the SERP's; this is long gone.

But sometime in the last year they have reinstated the very easy to do non-supplemental test:
site:www.example.com/*
This simple syntax will show results with pages that are not considered supplemental on your website. This syntax was probably broken for most of 2009, but it is back and working.

To get a list of your supplemental pages use:
-site:www.example.com/* site:www.example.com
These pages will not have images in the Google images results.

Make sure you sequence to at least the second page and perhaps the last page of these result to get a accurate page count from Google (Click Next!)

Your non-supplemental pages are the only pages that will show in the AOL search results. Try site:www.example.com at AOL and the number of results will closely match site:www.example.com/* on Google.

Supplemental status used to be a disaster, but now a days your supplemental pages will show in the search results just like your non-supplemental pages.

I believe Google simply chooses a certain percentage of a website's pages to be supplemental. Certainly Google considers these pages to be less important or less useful or less searched for topics. Pages such as Terms, Privacy Policy, even About may be supplemental. Pages with little content as well.

The supplemental test might help you choose pages to improve, and perhaps even create less useful pages that will help you meet your "supplemental" quota, whatever percentage that might be. Also you may have site design flaws causing most of your pages to be supplemental. (While writing this I found sites that are almost completely supplemental.)
I believe PageRank and inbound links will decrease this supplemental percentage threshold perhaps all the way to zero (No supplemental pages!)

While I was experimenting Google challenged me to see if I was a BOT.

About this page:
Our systems have detected unusual traffic from your computer network. This page checks to see if it's really you sending the requests, and not a robot. Why did this happen?

So much for supplemental!

[goodroi]

interesting. i am not 100% sure everything you say is correct but it is a very interesting observation.

i did notice that google only shows about 500 urls even though reporting more. this may be trouble for people with larger sites.

[tedster]

With regard to AOL site: operator results, they are almost always lower than Google's for the sites I check, even with the /* hack. Sometimes it's dramatically lower. I take this as evidence that Google only exports a subset of their index to AOL.

Even more, it's probably not an accurate model of Google's current infrastructure to think of "the" supplemental index. Instead, it's more likely that the complete index contains MANY secondary partitions, along the lines of this 2007 patent [webmasterworld.com] "System and method for selectively searching partitions of a database".

That patent was also published in 2007, within months of the disappearance of the "supplemental result" tag.

[g1smd]

Using a combination of operators, such as site: and inurl: or others is almost always likely to trigger the "are you a bot?" response from Google, especially when used with &num=100 too.

[epmaniac]

my inul: count is drastically less compared to site: count
does it indicate penalty?

also


my homepage shows on second page when run site: and inurl: operator... does it indicate penalty?

[indyank]

i did notice that google only shows about 500 urls even though reporting more. this may be trouble for people with larger sites.

i too notice it to be just around 500 on clicking through, though it reports more.It looks like google is just reporting a larger number, though they limit what is shown. I am not sure what kind of inferences can be drawn out of this test...

[tedster]

Epmaniac, inurl: counts are not even restricted to your own website. So no it is not an indication of a penalty. What doy ou see when you just search on example.com - without the "inurl"?

[epmaniac]

@tedster

i see example.com returned with also other sites (if they are referencing example.com) following, i understand your point...


but my homepage is not the first page returned when i do site: or inurl: operator on example.com

the homepage is returned as first result of all the related sites in my category,

ALSO

when run site:example.com i only see landing pages my subdomains getting indexed in LAST 24 HOURS filter..... my main domain's landing pages hardly appears to be in that filter...although my pages are being caches

this problem only started to happen after oct 21,... prior to that there were many main domain pages which used to be there in 24 HOURS FILTER