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SEO Question: Much of my website is in Google's Supplemental index? What is their supplemental index? How does it work? SEO Answer: What a timely question...where to start...well if the supplemental problem has only hit your site recently (as compared to the date of this post) it may be a Google specific problem that has caused them to dump thousands of sites recently.
Believe it or not, other than the home page most of this site is currently in supplemental results as of typing this, and with the current Google hole you can throw sites into supplemental hell within 72 hours.
Matt Cutts, a well known Google engineer, recently asked for feedback on the widespread supplemental indexing issue in this thread. As noted by Barry, in comment 195 Matt said:
Based on the specifics everyone has sent (thank you, by the way), I'm pretty sure what the issue is. I'll check with the crawl/indexing team to be sure though. Folks don't need to send any more emails unless they really want to. It may take a week or so to sort this out and be sure, but I do expect these pages to come back to the main index.
In this thread SEM4U points out that 72.14.207.104 was showing fewer supplemental sites than he saw on others like 64.233.179.104.
Some people are conspiring that generally lots of listed pages were dropped and only the longstanding supplemental pages remain, but that theory is garbage on my site...since I still see a strong PageRank 6 Supplemental page that was recently ranking in the SERPs for competitive phrases (prior to going supplemental) that recently went supplemental.
I have done a site redesign just after this supplemental deal occured, but that was sorta in coincidence with this happening. One good thing about that MovableType update is that the last version of MovableType I was using created these aweful nuclear waste redirect pages...it don't do that on version 3.2.
As far as other reasons this site could have possibly been hit supplemental:
- too much similar text on each page - but I do think it is common to have common sales elements on many pages of a site, so I doubt that is it
- redirect links - affiliate links via Clickbank and the direct affiliate program might have flagged some sort of trigger if Google was trying to work on 301 & 302 issues... but whatever they did I don't think they did it better ;)
- Google is a bit hosed right now
What are supplemental results?
Supplemental results usually only show up in the search index after the normal results. They are a way for Google to extend their search database while also preventing questionable pages from getting massive exposure.
How does a page go supplemental?
From my experiences pages have typically went supplemental when they became isolated doorway type pages (lost their inbound link popularity) or if they are deemed to be duplicate content. For example, if Google indexes the www. version of your site and the non www. version of your site then likely most of one of those will be in supplemental results.
If you put a ton of DMOZ content and Wikipedia content on your site that sort of stuff may go supplemental as well. If too much of your site is considered to be useless or duplicate junk then Google may start trusting other portions of your site less.
Negative side effects of supplemental:
Since supplemental results are not trusted much and rarely rank they are not crawled often either. Since they are generally not trusted much and rarely crawled odds are pretty good that links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much - if any - weight in Google.
How to get out of Google Supplemental results?
If you were recently thrown into them the problem may be Google. You may just want to give it a wait, but also check to make sure you are not making errors like www vs non www, content manangement errors delivering the same content at multiple URLs (doing things like rotating product URLs), or too much duplicate content for other reasons (you may also want to check that nobody outside your domain is showing up in Google when you search for site:mysite.com and you can also look for duplicate content with Copyscape).
If you have pages that have been orphaned or if your site's authority has went down Google may not be crawling as deep through your site. If you have a section that needs more link popularity to get indexed don't be afraid to point link popularity at that section instead of trying to point more at the home page. If you add thousands and thousands of pages you may need more link popularity to get it all indexed.
After you solve the problem it still may take a while for many of the supplementals to go away. As long as the number of supplementals is not growing, your content is unique, and Google is ranking your site well across a broad set of keywords then supplementals are probably nothing big to worry about.
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As an update to this post, Matt said that many of the issues associated with the mass supplemental issue I noted above have been fixed.
aargh. Have been doing some site redesigns, and while some sites are fine, others just can't break through the supplementals. I thought this was all sorted in March, it's now almost June...
Did you 301 redirect the old URLs to point at their new location? Do you have plenty of quality links? Are most of the outlinks to legit quality sites?
Yeah, it's been a real mixture. A 5 year old site with nothing dodgy going on got whacked real hard - struggling to get more than 10 pages indexed. While this is happening another "made for adsense" site of mine on a brand new domain is getting pages indexed as fast as I add them.
But most of my supplemental hell is over now :)
Well, to me, it happenned during the last 2 weeks only.
The site (RCP) is 10 months old and was doing quite well with Google (200-300 unique visitors from Google searches, I know it´s not a lot, but not bad from my point of view) by the end of July.
Then, suddenly, the traffic strated to drop, couple of uniques daily just dissappeared. I have not paid too much attention, I just thought - vacation time.
After couple of days, when RCP was still getting less and less traffic, I started to worry and checked site:www.roofingchildsplay.com and - bang - 10s of pages (there was only about 160 pages, not more) vanished.
I still paid no special attention, as before I supposed Google had over-estimated number of pages worth being indexed (as for the quality of content).
Only when the number of unique visitors from search engines dropped from 300/day to 30/day I also found out that the rest of the pages were only indexed within supplemental results.
I strongly hope it is just some temporary problem and it fixes somehow soon as (beside small number of inbound links) I can´t see any reasons why RCP should not be part of the main index. Couple of scraper sites copy minor portion of the content, but I suppose that Google has some more sophisticated criteria to reveal who´s copying whom.
Pages of my new forum (sandboxed domain) showed up for the first time on Google yesterday.
All of them in the supplemental index...
Another aspect to think about.
Star
I have started to work aggressively on adding unique description and keyword meta tags content to individuals pages, and this has pulled one site out from supplemental so far.
As for supplimental results, I have nearly 200 pages in the supplemental category, My web master did some 301 redirects of pages that were invalid or dead links. I really wish she had not done that. Can you Matt or someone look at my pages by going to site:www.soundproofingamerica.com and let me know what I can do to get my website out of this supplemental State. I really do appreciate the Help. Sincerely, Dr. Bob soundproofing America Inc.
I just found a lot of my pages in supp results. Not a good time of year for this to happen considering I have a fitness site. I changed some titles and descriptions. I also used my alt tag for descriptions. That was probably a big mistake since most of my description were basically the same. Now I will resubmit my Google site map. Hope this works and I will keep you posted.
I'd like to say that all my pages are supplemental, including some unique pages.
However, I noticed that when Google first crawled my site I made a novice SEO mistake by not including dynamically changed title, meta keywords, and description on some of my important pages. These important pages well need to be non-supplemental so that it can give me some weight in the SERP's. I realized the way I set my page up also, has unique content towards the bottom, but the header, meta area all were the same which probably made Google think it was spam / supplemental.
I read in order to fix this ASAP, its better to have Google remove all files that is supplemental and then to re-submit all url's with unique title's, meta keywords, and description on each page.
Is this true? I heard it can take up 6 months for your url to be removed. Any help will be appreciated.
And Weight LIfting Equipment, I hope you keep this post updated because I bookmarked it :)
my website is kinda new, but all my pages are supp. i do have dynamic titles, different keywords and description in all of my pages, not to mention content, but still everything except index is in supp. when i launched it, i had my base href without www, but now i added www. could this be the problem?
You may also just be running into link equity related issues as well..like if you do not have many trusted links they may not want to keep many pages from that site in their index.
Also worth noting the Google blog has a great post related to duplicate content.
I cant understand this part "links from supplemental pages likely do not pull much - if any - weight in Google" so ... is there weight of these links or better avoid them?
it is nice to read this issue, i have same problem for my client's site. i think it will solve shortly........i am waiting........
thanks
Deb
Please, please explain what you mean by rotating product urls? and why they are bad? My site has recently gone supplemental and this may have happened to me.
Rotating product urls...
that creates problems where the engine is always sending people to 404 errors...they don't like that.
Thanks! :)
It was a great article. I wanted to learn about this, and I hope I will not be caught into that.
All my sites (and blogs) have original content. It is an 'old' article though.
we had a site before in that we had approx 18,000 pages listed in google but due to some circumstances we have to close our old site and we created a new site with all the same datas and links that we used in our old site.
Within 2 months near about 7000 pages were added of our new site by google search engine, now a days we are suffering a trouble that most of the pages are having supplemental results.
1. How to remove supplemental result from my new site ?
2. If we add or remove some of the contain on the supplimental pages, can supplemental results will be
removed & will it be removed forever or it will be removed for sometimes.
3. How should i improve my Page rank in google ?
reply will be highly appreciated
Hey can you tell me, when we submit articles to different article directory, in that case it shows suply results. does it going to effect my ranking?
I recently had a page of my site - whyev.com/eniva-vibe.html go to a supplemental result.
It was number 1 for its main keyword eniva vibe and number 3 for another big keyword of mine eniva.
But what I did recently was change my .HTACCESS page with the following code.
Options All -Indexes
AddHandler x-httpd-php .html
And google had my site indexed as whyev.com/eniva-vibe instead of whyev.com/eniva-vibe.html and now I am no where to be found and when you do it is as a supplement result.
Please help me, I have since taking the code out of the .htaccess file .. please let me know how to get this out of supplemental results as it was #1 for its main keyword!!
Thanks - email me info @ whyev.com
Hai Aaron Wall,
The article is quite interesting on supplemental results, but according to my study google is having two index database rightnow, one is Main Index and the other is auxulary index. Webpages are going to supplemental coz either there is duplicate content or there are linnking problems.
Hope Everything will get better.
Jack Macferson
Site: http://www.indianpropertysearch.com
Blog: http://indianpropertysearch.blogspot.com
i also face the same problem with many of the website, we have made all the pages new but it is still in supplemental , the ex url is http://www.jaipurtravels.com
this is a big problem.
google seems hate new site.
it's only like old site.
This is such a bad if our sites comes into google supplemental results, my websites was top in all major keywords on my website but i dont know what happened i was out from all keywords.
please guide me if any one know how to comes back in search results.
http://www.gordoniihoodia.net
Hi Guys,
Aaron, great site...Read your book...wow leaves other guide in it's dust, great work.
Anyone know how to check what pages of your site are in the supplemental index? Is there a way out?
I have an Article Directory with tonnes of pages no doubt in the supp index.
If anyone knows of a tool that check for websites pages in supp index let us know. I'd like to check some of my sites to see if we can fix them.
please tell me exactly and in detail what to with this supplemental result
http://abibakar.blogspot.com
Aaron,
FYI As of today, July29th, 2007 you have 0 pages in the supplemental index from amongst the first 1000 results of your site--
try out http://www.theparadisephilippines.org/supplemental/
its an alternative tool to check google's supplemental results since google has disabled their supplemental index command.
Hi,
My website http://www.gazhoo.com is an online document marketplace. We have approximately 8,000 pages - all are supplemental as deemed by Websitegrader.
Will changing the metadata for each page to reflect the different documents shown by each page be enough?
Please help.
Read Jim Boykin's recent posts on supplemental results.
You also have to look at your overall PageRank, internal link structure, and how unique the on page content is for each page.
Thanks for post and comments. Another useful post about Google Supplemental: http://tropicalseo.com/2007/how-to-escape-googles-supplemental-index/
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