Supplemental Index - mystery or Google’s audacity
August 5, 2007 – 3:39 am
If your business has an online presence or you simply own any kind of website and you care about its Search engine presence, you have probably already heard about Google’s Supplemental Index. We may refer to its as “Google’s Gulag”, “Google’s Digital Dungeon”, or simply the most popular term: “Google Hell” or even “Screwed Pages” (Ok, I just made this one up). I’m sure (being a webmaster myself) that it does not feel nice to be put into a secondary register without warning and being told that our site pages are not important.
Is it really a bad thing? Altleast Google’s popular man Matt Cutts (the pacifier) doesn’t consider it as a penalty of any kind, they call it “dissection of data”.
Clients all over the world keep asking SEM firms about how to get out of this predicament. Is it really important? Lets face it, whether a good thing or not, webmasters are enthusiastic about the big G. There’s no argument on that point for one good reason: Google simply delivers the most search engine traffic on the web. Regardless of what Google maintains, being in the supplemental results is not a good thing for any webmaster or business.
The sins for which we may be paying (or simply the reasons for step motherly treatment) could be any of the following.
1. Duplicate Content – You act copycat, you’d be sent to google jail (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content – Empty pages get sent to Google Hell. Remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing? (Frankly, I never understood why would anyone have empty pages!!)
3. Orphaned web pages - Pages that no one links to, including yourself are considered not useful and sent to the secondary index.
To find out more details about read our article on supplemental index.
2 Responses to “Supplemental Index - mystery or Google’s audacity”
Add to this list : new pages and pages that are linked but do not have a minimum PR for elevating it to the “priced page” category. These pages may still rank well for queries where the returned set of results is small and the site on which this page resides is an old/established/autoritative domain.
Ashish
By Ashish Roy on Aug 12, 2007
@Ashish: New pages are in the process of indexing at the first place so chances of them being in supplemental index arise only after they are first indexed and considered as “not too useful” like you mentioned. Old/Authoritative sites have better chances of indexing (in the main index first).
Like you mentioned, results which might have gone to supplemental may appear if the search query has little or no results.. though there is no evidence to prove this.
By Aman Bahl on Aug 13, 2007