Google Supplemental Index Engulfing Web
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At the rate things are going, almost every page on the internet may soon spend time in “Google’s Supplemental Index”, which is, frankly, not a place any right-minded individual wants to spend even a moment in. Lately, it seems as if Google’s reasons for placing pages into their supplemental index are even more capricious than normal.
I’ve been studing the Supplemental Index for awhile, and I’m glad I’m not the only one who’s confused about it. Barry at SearchEngine Roundtable is confused by what Google’s had to say about it, and why seemingly “high-quality” pages can end up in this index too.
As Barry points out, Google is now pitching the idea of “Supplementals” as being just dandy. Others have observed that this can actually hurt your rankings, so why the change in attitude? Hard to say. I’m completely unhappy at how many completely orginal pages of content that I have marked supplemental. It is too damn much work to make pages by hand to have them going into a pergatory where they may not rank for money keywords.
Barry links to a post where Adam Lasnik of Google says:
Pages are in the supplemental results because we still wanted to be able to show them to users, but the pages didn’t have enough PageRank to make it into our main index (which is more extensive and updated with greater frequency).
Getting more *quality* backlinks is generally a good way to get more of your pages in the main index.
It’s the same idea as always. Obviously, the supplemental index means the pages aren’t “good enough” for Google’s main index. At least this indicates there’s a cure for this age-old dilemna and it’s the same answer for all things Google: get more links to your website.
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5 Responses to “Google Supplemental Index Engulfing Web”
Darren,
Great article because I have a lot of pages in the Supplemental Index.
I found the following on Google the other day:
What’s a “supplemental result?”
A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental 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.
If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly site, please visit our webmaster guidelines.
and If I read this right there is Nothing you can do about it.
Darren,
My question today is what does
number of parameters in a URL
mean?
By Bill on Nov 30, 2006
Hi Bill,
I’ll take Google’s word for it that the supplementals are “no big deal”. It’s all based on their crawl priorities and I’m sure supplementals can be brought back.
The number of parameters in the url refers to dynamic URLs that have arguments passed as parameters. Generally the format is /quiz.php?num=1 and the parameters come after the “?”.
If you have multiple parameters being passed, it’s generally considered good practice to use mod-rewrite to rewrite the urls to a SEF (search engine friendly) format.
By Darren McLaughlin on Nov 30, 2006
This supplemental problem has really been bothering me. I thought it was just my site.
I have completly re-written a number of pages and gotten links directed specifically to them, but can’t seem to bail them out.
After reading your post, I guess I am doing all the right things and hope in time they will come out of google’s closet.
Thanks, I see now that I am not the only one and feel my plan of action is on track
By Illa Maden on Dec 1, 2006
Honestly,
It really bothers me, too
I’d love to just see a clean “site” command. I’m working on a few things right now to attempt to fix this.
By Darren McLaughlin on Dec 2, 2006