Question about Google supplemental

[WilliamT]

I have read quite a bit and understand many of the issues about this. But one basic thing just does not make sense to me. I would think that a page would either be supplemental or not. I understand that if you have the same content on more than one page, then you might find that content at one url in supplemental and at another url not in supplemental.

But how can the exact same page, with the exact same url, be listed in both supplemental and non-supplemental results?

[Marcia]

But how can the exact same page, with the exact same url, be listed in both supplemental and non-supplemental results?

Are you noticing thats it's Supplemental for one phrase or search term, and not Supplemental for another?

[tedster]

The objects in the Supplemental Index are composed of a url plus a cache date, not just a url. So it can happen, especially after a change in content, that the old version of the url remains alive in the Suppplemental Index while the new version is in the regular index.

But it's getting very difficult to see what's going on anyway, since Google has dropped the Supplemental Results tag is recent times.

[tedster]

I should add that some people were also reporting cases with the same cache date and url showing up with and without the suppolemental tag for differnt searches. What that was about we never figured out, as far as I know. Google has maybe a half million servers distributed all over the place. With that much data, funny things do happen.

[WilliamT]

Yes, this last one is it. The particular urls are identical. And the date and time of the cache is the same. The only search I do to find them is this:
site:yourdomainnamehere.com/& or this:
site:yourdomainnamehere.com/

Some pages are in both results.

If Google has dropped the tag, why don't they can the whole system of even returning supplemental results?

Thanks!

[edited by: WilliamT at 6:40 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2007]

[Marcia]

>>why don't they can the whole system

William, they can't get rid of it, it's the way their whole file system is set up. It's like the "operating system" of the search engine, and the file setup is like what the FAT 32 or NT file structure is to a Windows system. The Supplemental index is like an archive of web pages that are less important than the ones in the "active" files. It would be like us getting rid of Windows or Linux because some of our less important email or inactive files are archived.

>>site:yourdomainnamehere.com/& or this:
>>site:yourdomainnamehere.com/

Of course it shows the same pages doing that, one is showing "all of it" and the others showing only a portion of the whole thing. But those aren't different search terms - they're just a different way of searching for the same set of documents, with one search asking to see all the documents and the other asking to see only some of the documents.

Doing searches for "summer widgets" and "summer widget enclosures" would be different searches - they're different phrases and will bring up pages from many different web sites. The searches you did aren't for phrases.

It's nothing to be concerned about, and thank goodness we've still got some way to know which of our pages are Supplemental. Some of us believe that it's a way to know that our navigation could use work to make it more user-friendly.

[edited by: Marcia at 7:33 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2007]

[WilliamT]

I see. I thought that one was normal results, which did not include supplemental and the other was only supplemental. Sorry I misunderstood.

Why is it not important? I think because my site is fairly new, small, and has almost no strong links to it, my pages are almost all supplemental. I have 41 pages at this point, and the supplemental limited search returns 35 of them. That can't be good? Or does it not matter.

Another interesting thing is that if I search for the title of one of my posts without quotes, it is the first hit listed of approx 1,777,000. If I enclose it in quotes, only 97 results are returned, but my article is still at the top. This even though that article is in the Google supplemental index. So that may indeed indicate that this is not that important an issue.

That would be nice as I love it when I can forget about something and just go back to the business at hand!

[edited by: WilliamT at 8:19 pm (utc) on Sep. 1, 2007]

[jimbeetle]

I think because my site is fairly new, small, and has almost no strong links to it, my pages are almost all supplemental.

Yep, it's all a matter of links. As your pages build PageRank they will start to move into the main index. As you go link hunting, try to concentrate on getting links to the interior pages, that's the quickest way of pulling them out of the supp index.