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What are supplemental results?
Website owners with low PageRank sometimes notice that their pages are in the supplemental results. The reason they go supplemental can easily be explained if a site has many pages but low Pagerank. This is when more incoming links are required to increase PR to get the entire website crawled and indexed in the regular Google index.
Important Message from Google’s Matt Cutts:
Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
It is true that the best links are earned organic links so stay clear of heavy link building and instead try to impress people with your quality content to gain natural incoming links.
To see which of your pages are in the supplemental index do a search in Google using site:www.yoursite.com (click link for example). You will often notice a bunch of stuff that is of low value and should be in supplementals like tags and duplicate content. Google does a pretty good job of deciding what is the best path to the most valued content but you can help Googlebot by eliminating duplicates yourself.
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January 26th, 2007 at 7:25 am
I am still not very clear on what actually are supplemental results? Feels like am too dumb, seriously ;)
E.g. hen I do this search on Google: site:www.dyedfabrics.com and it says following:
“In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 2 already displayed. If you like, you can repeat the search with the omitted results included.”
Are these two non-showing results considered supplemental?
January 26th, 2007 at 12:06 pm
SEO Pakistan - No it would say “Supplemental Result” (like you see here) next to them, but I agree it is kind of confusing. Your few pages are not getting “Supplimental Results” currently so it is not logical for Google to show them that way. It could point to relevance? (Hrm, interesting thought) :-)
I am seeing many pages for SEO Buzz Box in supplemental and I surely have enough pagerank. What I have done is link the categories on this blog in the sidebar to better distribute pagerank to what is within. If this doesn’t bring the pages out of supplemental, further explanation will be required from Google.
This post is about what I do know currently and will be expanded in time, it certainly can answer a few novice questions and that was my goal, to have something to reference in Google Groups and SEO forums, these questions will not go away.
January 27th, 2007 at 12:41 am
Thanks for the explanation… I now understand it better… But still need to learn more on how to handle such instances!
Once again, thanks a lot and have a nice weekend!
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:37 am
Question, do you have to achieve a certain level of PageRank, or just improve the current PageRank?
May 2nd, 2007 at 7:53 am
That is a good question Murry and what I have seen from my handful of blogs is that you need a certain level of pagerank (incoming links) to start to develop your “site flavor”. You will compete well in future Google algorithms as you build your content with just a few “earned” links.