Google's Supplemental Results: What's So Bad?, Why do you panic? Options

[Michael Martinez]

Okay.

I'm really, truly, genuinely curious about why people get so upset when their pages "go Supplemental".

What's your beef? Please share your thoughts here. I am not looking to convince anyone of anything or to argue about anything. If I follow up, it will probably only to be to ask for some clarification or to respond to questions, etc.

Please explain what makes you go, "Ewww!" when you see "Supplemental Result" next to one of your page listings.

[torka]

I dunno, Michael. I have so little time to work on any SEO stuff for my own personal sites, I'm thrilled just to see them in any results at all. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/embarrassed.gif) Regular listings, supplemental listings, "we had nothing else to show for this query so we'll display this one even though it sucks" listings... I'll take whatever I can get and be glad of it. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/kicking.gif)

I'm sure that's just me, though. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)

--Torka (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/mf_prop.gif)

[wowdezign]

Well, since I am not glowing with SEO experience, I try to go by what others have said about them.

However, when I (or someone else) flip my logic and reasoning switch to the on position, my thinking begins to traveel the following course:

When I think of supplements I think of vitamins and/or herbs one can take to improve their diet and overall health. These make up the difference between the main diet intake and the complete dietary recommendations.

That being said, I have never tried to sit down and pour a bowl full of suppliments and eat them as my complete dietary allowance for the day.

Cake + Icing = complete (IMO).
Only Cake = doable but maybe bland.
Only Icing = well, might seem good at first, but gets old fast.

[Sarah]

For me, the sites I work on only have supplemental listings where pages have been indexed which no longer apply as the deals have expired. Unfortunately it runs off a crappy back-end I can't control and makes up lots of URLS which get indexed, then the page is taken down after a couple of weeks ( (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/censored.gif) ) and anothe rsupplemnetal listing is created.

It annoys me because, supplemental listings essentially mean (to my understanding) sucky or untrustworthy pages. So I know that the site is good, but someone else may see that they're not & think th esite is sucky when it isn't.

[wowdezign]

It annoys me because, supplemental listings essentially mean (to my understanding) sucky or untrustworthy pages.

Sarah, Why is that your understanding of them?

[glengara]

To me they show something isn't quite right, the reasons for them seem to range from the fairly innocuous to the fairly serious, but they've never been a GOOD sign.

[qwerty]

At least in the past, seeing a listing come up as supplemental often served as an indicator that the file was going to disappear from the index soon, but in the post Big Daddy era, that doesn't seem to be the case anymore. More pages seem to be listed as supplemental for a longer time, there doesn't seem to be any relationship between supplemental and delisting, and I'm even seeing URLs that have been returning 404s for as long as five months continuing to show up as supplemental results.

In other words, I don't think it indicates anything anymore.

[Sarah]

Sarah, Why is that your understanding of them?

Because I sat thru a lot of seminars at SES London, and one of the big things which came across to me was that Supplemental Results are not the greatest thing on the planet to have, that they are there to indicate that the SE does know the pages are there and that they are unsure as to the 'goodness' (sorry my internal thesaurus has run out after a day of copy-editing) of that page.

Or that as in my case I have pages indexed which are no longer around and are waiting to be de-listed.

I'm even seeing URLs that have been returning 404s for as long as five months continuing to show up as supplemental results.

Picking up from another thread discussion today, Google has a lot of spammy pages to get rid of at the moment, so maybe they are taking their time getting around to the supplemental index so as not to get rid of any genuine website pages.... and I can't find the thread and think I'm going crazy or didn't read it here.

I'm going home, to collect my thoughts and will get my quotes out from my SES notes (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

[Michael Martinez]

Because I sat thru a lot of seminars at SES London, and one of the big things which came across to me was that Supplemental Results are not the greatest thing on the planet to have, that they are there to indicate that the SE does know the pages are there and that they are unsure as to the 'goodness' (sorry my internal thesaurus has run out after a day of copy-editing) of that page.

I think this is an interesting issue in part because Google is so inspecific about Supplemental Results. They actually use the same exact wording in at least two different pages on their site.

From: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/b...4473&topic=8523

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.

I specifically asked Matt Cutts to explain the Supplemental Index on his blog, but in typical Google fashion he replied in a rather ambiguous fashion.

From: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/indexing-timeline/

Matt, everyone knows that Google has a Supplemental Index, but no one outside of Google knows exactly what it is and what its purpose is.

Even if you cannot give us the details, will you please share a working definition that SEOs can point to as the most reliable description?

Michael Martinez, personally I’d think of it as a fallback way that we can return results for specific queries where we might not have as many results in the main index. Okay, now I really am going to go.

I think SEOs in general associate diminished quality (or "goodness") with the Supplemental Results index. I don't know enough about it to form an opinion of it. I've seen very old versions of content and multiple duplicate copies of content show up as Supplemental, but I've also seen the main pages of major, very active, highly popular media sites come up as Supplemental.

About all that Google will confirm is that the Supplemental Index has its own crawlers and (at least in the post-Big Daddy world) that it isn't rebuilt as often as the main index.

If the only way you can get in is through the Supplemental Index, and you still rank well, do you feel that you're getting less prominent visibility (not placement) or less distinguished visibility?

That is, do you feel the typical surfer associates any sort of value with Supplemental Results, or is this more of an issue with SEO-aware Webmasters?

[juliesjewels]

That is, do you feel the typical surfer associates any sort of value with Supplemental Results, or is this more of an issue with SEO-aware Webmasters?

I think the average surfer might believe the Supplemental Results listings are a form of paid advertisements used to supplement the regular listings for a particular search. For me, this would make me less likely to click the link simply because I associate some of the paid listings I've seen to cheesy infomercials that play on TV late at night. I think the words "supplemental results" would throw up a red flag to the average surfer, IMHO. I wonder if anyone has done a formal study on these listings and click-through rates. (IMG:http://www.highrankings.com/forum/style_emoticons/default/hmm.gif)

[OldWelshGuy]

Supplimental results only suppliment the main index. The problems with it is that they decide your page is supplimental, so they roll back the cache to 6-12 months prior. Nothing you do on that page will make a difference. Google send pages to the SI for many reasons beyond that which they state. They send duplicate pages there (as in dups on the same site), they send badly linked pages there. in fact there appears to be very little ryhme or reason as to why they send pages. It CERTAINLY has nothing to do with spiderability as they state, because we have all seen different.

The simple problem with Sup pages is that they only show when there are no results, so if you are in anything like a competitive area, the pages do not show. They just as well not exisit.

The general user does not have a clue what a SI page is, why should they? I t IS an SEO aware thing, in much the same as ALL marketing is a marketing thing, hardware is a hardware thing etc. It matters only to the people it affects.

Scenario.

Google shifts a load of pages to the Si, this makes the content miles out of date. Owner updates the content of these pages, but Google are not interested, and in fact when they do update the content the page stays in the SI, why?

[glengara]

* The problems with it is that they decide your page is supplimental, so they roll back the cache to 6-12 months prior.*

I was just looking at a sup page with a May 2006 cache, it's one caught in the post BD linkage/indexing scenario, IMO.

[Michael Martinez]

* The problems with it is that they decide your page is supplimental, so they roll back the cache to 6-12 months prior.*

I was just looking at a sup page with a May 2006 cache, it's one caught in the post BD linkage/indexing scenario, IMO.

I think Bob made a good point when he said things seem to have changed with Big Daddy (January - April 2006 rollout of Google's new search engine).

The rules do seem to have changed, but I still see older content in the Supplemental Results. Most of my content rarely changes. So, for sites like mine, that's not a real issue.

OWG raises a great point, though. If you change your page today and for whatever reason its listing goes supplemental, if Google shows old cached data people are not seeing whatever is relevant to your current content.

But to some extent, we have to live with that chance of unintentional misdirection anyway.

Does it increase with Suppelemental Results?

[glengara]

*I think Bob made a good point when he said things seem to have changed with Big Daddy*

Whatever the reasons for pages going supplemental, the consensus seems to be that it's not a positive move...

[qwerty]

Yes, but it used to be a decidedly negative thing to find that a page was listed as supplemental, unless it was one you were trying to get out of the index. That's changed. If what Matt wrote is true, there are times when it would be positive to see your page in the supplemental listings. All I know is that I'm seeing more pages listed that way now, but I don't think it's necessarily a good or bad thing.

That is, unless you read the quote below to mean that pages in the supplemental index are potentially problem pages, which would mean that Yahoo and MSN will have trouble indexing them, and Google may not be able to bring them into the main index.

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.