Supplemental results pages - can they kill your search engine rankings?

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Supplemental results are a widely discussed issue these days. They’re unseemly and usually a sign that something’s wrong with your website. Even more ominously, people are concerned that Supplemental pages may spell doom for your website. I’m inclined to agree with those views.

Of course, I’m no Google employee, so I can’t be sure about my theory, but it does seem that too many supplemental pages at some point appear to trigger a domain wide “penalty” that makes ranking results lower across the board. Of course there have been anecdotal reports that support this theory, but nothing authoritative. In any even, I’m willing to go out on a line and say that if you have an extremely large number of supplemental results on your website, your domain will probably suffer to some degree in Google.

Let’s consult the Google Bible and see if they can shed some light on the subject:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

So there you have it. The only official word on the subject. Strangely enough, the language refers only to a “site” and doesn’t mention pages. It’s quite common for a domain to still be in the regular index.  So the official word of Google doesn’t tell us much and we’ll just have to rely on our own observational skills.

Interesting to check also, is to see the IP address of the cache to determine which DataCenter is serving up the supplementals.  There seems to be a huge increase this week in Supplementals on 72.14.203.104. (Note: to see the Cache IP, just click on the Cache link in front of the normal results).  We’ll all have to see what this week in Google brings, but it will at least hopefully represent progress.

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