Are You In Google’s Supplemental Index
Did you know that Google has two indexes in which your website pages could be listed? One is good but the other is bad so read on to see which is which.
A quick query in Google of the command site:yourdomain.com will return the number of pages that Google has indexed from that domain. However on closer inspection you will probably see that some of these pages will be labelled with the extra wording ’supplemental result’. Having pages in the Supplemental Index is not good as Google sees these pages as second rate, not sure about, possibly duplicate etc. Basically Google will only return these pages to a searcher AFTER returning all other non-supplemental results.
My research for this article led me to the respected SEO guru Aaron Wall. He has posted a great article on this subject on his blog titled View all your Google Supplemental Results.
To quote Aaron:
Pages that are in the supplemental index are placed there because they are trusted less. Since they are crawled less frequently and have less resources diverted toward them, it makes sense that Google does not typically rank these pages as high as pages in the regular search index.
So how many of your indexed pages are supplemental?
Well the slow method is to count all the supplemental result pages returned from the query site:yourdomain.com.
Much faster is to use the query site:yourdomain.com ***-sljktf which will only return the supplemental pages.
Once you have identified those page that are supplemental you can then start to determine exactly why they are being singled out and correct or amend as necessary. I’ll cover why pages become supplemental in a later post.
SEO
