Supplemental Results – What They Are, How to Find Them and How to Get Out of Them

Supplemental Results – What They Are, How to Find Them and How to Get Out of Them

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

Nonsense!

At the time of this article Google was already starting to eliminate their search results showing supplemental results. Until recently, all you had to do was go to the last few pages of your query and locate the pages that had ' - Supplemental Result' just after the page size. They aren't showing these anymore. Here's what they had to say,

"Since 2006, we've completely overhauled the system that crawls and indexes supplemental results. The current system provides deeper and more continuous indexing. Additionally, we are indexing URLs with more parameters and are continuing to place fewer restrictions on the sites we crawl. As a result, Supplemental Results are fresher and more comprehensive than ever. We're also working towards showing more Supplemental Results by ensuring that every query is able to search the supplemental index, and expect to roll this out over the course of the summer.

The distinction between the main and the supplemental index is therefore continuing to narrow. Given all the progress that we've been able to make so far, and thinking ahead to future improvements, we've decided to stop labeling these URLs as "Supplemental Results." Of course, you will continue to benefit from Google's supplemental index being deeper and fresher."

Google then said that the easiest way to identify these pages is like this; "First, get a list of all of your pages. Next, go to the webmaster console [Google Webmaster Central] and export a list of all of your links. Make sure that you get both external and internal links, and concatenate the files.

Now, compare your list of all your pages with your list of internal and external backlinks. If you know a page exists, but you don't see that page in the list of site with backlinks, that deserves investigation. Pages with very few backlinks (either from other sites or internally) are also worth checking out."

Nonsense!

The easiest way to identify your supplemental pages is by entering this query 'site:www.yoursite.com/&'

Okay so now you have identified the pages that are in supplemental results and not showing up in the results anywhere.

Now we need to identify why they are there. The main reasons that a page goes to supplemental results are;

1. Duplicate Content
   
2. 301's. Redirected Pages that have a cache date prior to the 301 being put in place
   
3. A 404 was returned when Google attempted to crawl it
   
4. New Page
   
5. Bad Coding
   
6. Page Hasn't Been Updated in Awhile
   
7. Pages That Have Lost Their Back Links
   
8. And according to Matt Cutts of Google,"PageRank is the primary focus determining whether a URL is in the main web index vs. supplemental results"
   

Now this isn't the end-all, but it covers about 95% of the reason that you may be in the supplementals.

So now we know what they are, how to find them and why they are most likely in the supplemental results. Now let's get them out of there.

Here are the different methods that I use when I find that a page has gone supplemental;

1. Add fresh content to the page
   
2. Add navigation to the page from the main page
   
3. Move the pages to the first subdirectory if it is not already there
   
4. Get a back link to the page and/or create a link from an existing internal page with the anchor text containing the keywords for that page
   
5. Do some social bookmarking on the page
   
6. Make sure the page is included in my xml sitemap and then resubmit it to Webmaster Central.
   
7. Lastly, if none of the above seem to be working after 90 days, and I have another page that is relevant and does have PageRank and isn't listed in the supplemental, I do a 301 (permanent redirect) to it from the supplemental page.