One more thing I would like to add, is that you can create links like this on the numbered results pages up to 100, even beyond the existing results. This will ensure that any future supplemental get knocked down.

Basically you are getting se's to index their own results.

Amazing. Every three out of four documents on ibm.com is in the supplemental index!

I think the new command is:
site:www.yoursitename.com/&

Aaron,

Great post, I am glad I didn't just look-over this post in my reader. Thank you!

"If you want to view ONLY your supplemental results...."

site: works just fine to for me to get my listings of supplemental results. That's all I have, so it makes it easy to find them all! Even unique content no longer matters with my sites.

Nice command. This is the first time I've seen it and I read a lot of SEO/SEM blogs.

I threaded thru links from this post and others about supplemental pages and loss of link equity. I have a large list of outbound links on my links page. When I used Google's inbound links tool, I found that, although my site is still listed in many directories, Google does not count their links as inbounds. But I have to keep linking to most of these directories to keep their inbound links. What if I just disallowed my links page from robots.txt? Wouldn't that improve my situation?

I found using the supplemental command that an entire subsite I no longer update is supplemental, so I disallowed Googlebot for that subdirectory. I have never used robots.txt on my site, so I expect to find out firsthand if kicking hundreds of supplemental pages to the curb will improve my rankings for the rest of the site I still want people to see.

Nice to know. It's curious that Google shows some of my articles as both non-supplemental and supplemental. Very odd. I will keep watch on that situation. Thanks.

Hey Aaron, Thanks for the great tip!

My site scores a dismal .99 on the supplemental ratio. And that is with thousands of pages! All because google went and indexed every variation and link within my vBulletin forums.

If I make the necessary corrections in the robots.txt file with the Google wildcard robots.txt exclusion for those specific parameters that is causing duplicate content within my forums... should I purge those cached files from the Google Index using the "Cache Removal" tool they provide? Would there be any harm in deleting .99 percent of my cache (.99 is in supplemental index) from google? Thanks Aaron!

Aaron

I have a number of results that appear in both listings. Can a page be in both the supplemental index and not?

Hi Andrew
I have noticed a few good pages which showed in the supplemental results search mentioned above while also being in the regular index, but largely most of the pages that show up as supplemental using that search are of low value and / or not very unique and / or have limited linkage data pointing at them.

I am really suffering from supplemental results with my blog. I am trying your tips with the robots.txt. I am not worried too much, but I would feel better if I didn't see so many supp results.

how did you found out about this command?

i checked my site and found lots of supplement results but i still rank high for that particular page.

Hey Aaron,

This operator seems to be more accurate if you use a gibberish string of characters instead of "view". Eg:

site:www.yoursite.com *** -ndsfoiw

great tip!

I added the robot.txt file you pointed out an earlier post, and after only a day my number of pages in the regular Google index has double.

Great tip.

Great command. Great post.

As a nerdy form of comedy, it can be funny to use the command on popular blogs or sites to see what Google basically says "Who Cares?" or "This sucks!"

Like these domains:
ready.gov
shoemoney.com

Also, more importantly, a great tool for discovering SEO mistakes or pages to work on.

So a Supplemental Ratio of 2:1 or more is pretty darn bad, eh?

Hi Aaron,
I've tested this command on about a dozen domains so far. One thing I notice is that it's not very accurate. I'm not talking about an innacuracy with the number of pages which fall within the supplemental results index when you use this for example:

site:www.yoursite.com *** -ndsfoiw

But rather that some of the pages showing as supplemental are not actually supplemental after all. For example, if I take one of the corresponding URL titles from a page displayed from the command above and drop that in Google, it doesn't show as a supplemental result in Google's SERPs.

I'm not sure of the discrepancy or reason why there's a difference. Any ideas?

Thanks, now I can see exactly which pages I need to add more quality links to.

The first time I tried this, it worked fine and gave me the supp results. I then took out the *** -view part to get the other pages. Again fine.

But, I wasn't quite sure I copied the first number correctly so I did the supp one again. The number doubled. It I clicked the refresh button, the count went up again.

I then got "We're sorry...

... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now. "

Hi All,

How to overcome from these supplement page results to regular pages. What are the main factors for a website for going in supplement pages.

Varun Saxena

Google is cracking down on automated queries right now. I have been getting a lot of that as well.

If you search quickly you get lots of that.

Is 71% supplemental bad? =P At first it was 0%, but I took out "www" and it showed all the supp results. Even though they are all on "www"

it's very unlikely that you will reply to my post but I am posting in hope that others can give a reply -

Out of 450, 250 of my pages are in supplement index. I don't think it's possible for me to get a backlink for each of the page so what can I do ?

Aaron:
Thanks for the tip, it certainly is a meassure of health for a site.

Coders2020:
You shoul check Aaron's post about getting your site of the Supplemental Results at Google:
http://www.seobook.com/archives/002030.shtml

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 Aaron!

Thank you verymuch for this tip.

I recently started reading regularly your website.

Thanks again

Thanks for the heads up on this, Aaron - your posts on link equity have made for really interesting recently.

Oh, and Dave, for SEO and vbulletin, hopefully this may be a starter help:
http://www.ibrian.co.uk/01-02-2007/seo-for-vbulletin-simple-how-to-and-t...

Hi, I was wondering what that robots.txt file was that John Wesley on February 14 posted about?

Trying to help my grandfather get his florist site out of supplemental index!!! :P (currently about 80% is in supp... he is saddened.)

Thanks Aaron or anyone who could point me to that... he didn't really explain where he found that robots info.

:)

Drew

Oh-kay! John emailed me with the answer... you can umm... delete these comments! haha.

Thanks John.

The number kept on changing from a lower value to a higher ones until it stopped at one point. I searched using site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf

Hi,

Probably being thick, but does it really not matter what you put after the *** section?

Cheers

hi,

i go to goog and type this "site:seobook.com * * * -* * *" (without quote)

and i FOUND something funny there..

anybody can explain this ?

thanks,

So, I've been smashing my head on my desk lately because I've been using this command and for 4 of my sites it returns 100% of my pages as supplemental.

When I actually browse through the results, it turns out the ratio is much less when you actually look for the little "supplemental" indicator on the results.

So does anyone know if this command is busted and returning non-supplemental results or are my sites completely in the supplemental index and some are just not showing the supplemental indicator?

Hi Aaron,

I am currently working for the promotion of two sites. These sites have domain nearly Three months old and page rank 0. Most of the pages indexed in google for these sites are supplemental results with supplemental index ratio of .77 (very high ratio).
I have studied that most probable reason for supplemental results may be that the site is not having enough links and page rank.So, i have started promoting site through web directory submissions since one and half month,done crosslinking b/w pages and arranging backlinks from similar sites having high page rank. But there is no improvement in the condition of supplemental results.
I have also checked for the duplicacy of content but didn't find anything impressing.

Could you plz tell me the way to sort out this problem. By how much time these supplemental results can be removed from the site.

I have also found that several pages are in the supplemental index when doing a site:domain.com search, but not are not supplemental when those pages are appearing in the regular serps. Rankings seem as good as ever.

Glad to hear others are noticing the change.

@Chris Stark - I definitely this method is busted, but only "recently". Where recently is in the last month or so.

If you interesting, in my blog I write about opposite method: "How To Exclude Supplemental Results From Your Google Index Results".

Hi Sam
Wouldn't it have been just as easy to write

to see your site's results without supplemental results use
site:www.seobook.com -allinurl:www.seobook.com

instead of the one sentence tip linkdrop wrapped in AdSense ads and footer links for singles and swingers?

Hi Aaron,

Great post, thanks. I checked my supplemental results and as I am using WordPress, pretty much every page has a feed and it seems like most of them are in the supplemental Index - presumably because they are duplicate content.

Is this an issue? If so what would you recommend?

Many thanks!
Frank

ps I notice a commenter on another post who used robots.txt to disallow Google from indexing his feeds for the same reason I outline above...

I have two questions on that.

1. Is having a high supplemental ratio a bad thing in the feed instance? I'd love to read up on the impact of this...

2. Feeds are very search engine friendly I thought, but is this negated by them being in the supplemental index or is the supplemental index more to do with what is presented to the searchers?

Thanks so much for any further feedback on this issue you can provide.

Can I promote my blog, or not? ;)

Btw - you have very strange point of view. You can write long pointless post, which meaning
"if you want to see your supplemental results just reques site:www.yoursite.com *** -sljktf in google",
you can have big halfpage ad on page bottom...

And you blame me for the same?

ohh, ohh, I forgot about sidebar-like ad... Whose blog wrapped in ads, you said?

The more effective way of promotion is to leave a comment that adds value and then have me want to link at your site from within a post, IMHO.

Hi,
Thanks for sharing this nice info with us. Other these two points that:
1. Duplicate Contents.
2. Less back Links

I think another point of consideration is no of HITs your page is getting. With Page rank tool from google, not google have started getting these stats as well. So making navigation of your site better will be more important now to have hits on most of the pages.

Thanks & Regards,
Amit Agrawal

Founder & Director
Cyber Infrastructure (P) Limited
Software Development & Consultancy; Product Testing Development & Maintenance;
SEO-Internet marketing; ITO,BPO,EPO,KPO; Staffing solutions.

Shaping businesses with more then 34,000 man days of experience.

http://www.cisin.com (One Stop IT Services & Solutions)

Hi Aaron,

I've just noticed that the *** -view trick doesn't work anymore. you get regular results.
Do you have any idea why this is so and how we can search again for the supplemental results on Google?

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 data 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.

Note:
1. Old site is no more Online.
2. 575 pages wihtout supplemental results.
3. 13,500 pages with 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

I think that none of them work.Look like google want to hide this information from webmaster.
Alas less power for understanding google and seo ALlgoytme

Hi Yaniv
I think Google doesn't want that query to work. Their suggestions for open marketplaces and helping webmasters are typically only half honest...PageRank is perpetually outdated, Google blocked third party AdSense trackers, etc etc etc

Thanks for nice reaction on my grumbling :)

the command (site:www.skyportal.net *** -sljktf) doesn't work anymore.

Aaron,

Any updated information regarding this post? Yan's comment on Aug. 11th seems to work, it shows 145 of your 2000+ pages as supplemental. Is this accurate?

Hi James
Some of those pages look like they might be supplemental, but some of them also are not (like my article on search engine relevancy algorithms). I would say the majority of those articles are supplemental though.

What about the site:www.yoursitename.com/* command? It seems as if it can deliver the non-supplemental results. Is this possible?

You can try using the hack listed here.

Search engine optimization is a time taking and tricky business. It requires a lot of effort and hard work to rank in top. But the key phrases used to rank well on one search engine may totally fail or be less effective to rank on other search engines. Well all the majorly known search engines differ from each other in some form or the other. It is for this reason that some people create web pages for a particular search engines while the rest of the pages are created for other search engines. Usually a slight difference is present in these pages. So when indexing takes place the search engine crawlers might find the slightest difference and mark them as spam. To overcome these difficulties a robot.txt file is created which is a simple txt or word pad file that is uploaded in the root folder of your site.

Write the following
User-Agent: (Spider Name)
Disallow: (File Name)

To disallow all engines from indexing a file you simply use the * character where the engines name would usually be. However beware that the * character won't work on the Disallow line.

Be careful clicking on that ti recommended link. The page tries to download a trojan.

which page tries to download a trojan?

Aaron is the supplemental index valued as it used to one year ago?

If yes then you got a problem as well because the tool says:

# 1730 are in the main index
# 2580 are in the supplemental index

These are the results for seobook :P

I would love to see an update on supplemental index from you

thanks in advance!!!

This is sorta along my current thinking
http://www.seobook.com/archives/001985.shtml

The simplest way to use this clever tool - thedownloadplanet.com/supplemental/ for Supplemental Index Ratio calculation

Gee...and if people only provide a sitewide outbound link to some stupid supplemental tool do you think that would increase or decrease their internal PageRank flow? Wouldn't that increase their number of supplemental documents & harm their websites?

Why yes it would.

Pretty sleazy marketing there brunoid. Your account has been banned.

Hi Aaron, what's up?
I have a bit of a problem here. Google has indexed more than 50,000 pages of my site, but more than 99% of it is in the secondery index. How do I "save" it? many of it are pages from an events calender, where the title of the webpage is almost the same, apart for the date on it, which is different.

the title of these webpages are rather short, and the URL is quite "friendly". Any suggestions? I'd appreciate any input, THX

We answer specific SEO questions like that in our community forums Omer. To answer it well I would need to analyze your website...and I can't do that publicly without putting a $0 price on my time, which is not smart to do since our site basically sells consulting services.