Supplemental pages

[Doubi]

Can any of you guys please shine some light on the topic of supplemental pages.:confused:
I don't really understand what they are and what the issue is with them.

[Blazingpie]

A supplemental page is one that Google doesn't value enough to include into it's main index. This is normally due to low page rank (note, I'm referring to Google's internal page rank score, which is a floating-point number, and not the butchered and inaccurate one you see in the tool bar).

The problem with them is that as they don't appear in the main index, so they don't rank as highly as they could. Sure, sometimes they do rank over non-supplemental pages, but as they don't have a lot of value they are seen as bad.

I did read somewhere (Cutt's blog I think) that a supp page won't appear in the main index at all unless it has at least 1 non-supp page link to it or something, but don't quote me on that

[daniel]

From my experience, the biggest and most obvious reason of pages going supplemental is the fact that there is some duplication of some sort, ie: title tags are the same throughout the site.

I have also seen pages going supplemental when the non www domain is not redirected correctly.

Normally its quiet easy to fix when the problem occurs above, we implement unique titles etc and then purchase a high pr link to aid indexing of the new pages.


Daniel

[Chatmaster]

I actually find supplimental results every now and then, but definately not for competitive terms. Just pointing you towards this discussion on Matt's blog where he discusss supplimental results (http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-hell/).
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).
So it seems to be backlink related...

[Koz]

From my experience a lack of fresh content results in supplimental pages. On my little site, I could see a bunch of pages going supplimental, then added new content, even edited a bit of the old content and it was all back again.

[Doubi]

So is it a good idea to link to old blog posts with new ones to try and get them out of the supplemental indexing?

[Chatmaster]

Doubi can you perhaps shed more light on your problem. A asume that you are having a problem with one of your sites going supplimental? Can you perhaps answer a few questions?
1. How often do you update content on the site?
2. How often do you add new pages?
3. When you add new content do you also get internal backlinks to them, when you publish them?
4. Do you have different page titles and meta description tags?

[Doubi]

Well Chatmaster, I do blog posts twice a week. Update content on a regular base and do ad internal backlinks to content. The problem i face is mostly old blog posts going supplemental so what do i do to reduce the supplemental pages. I wanted to know if its a good idea to link new posts to supplemental posts.

[Koz]

Honestly I wouldn't worry too much about blog posts going supplemental. As long its the individual posts and not the archive pages. An experiece I've had with a blog was this: individual post that where ranking where going supplemental and no longer ranking. Then I notice their archive pages started ranking instead.

Maybe check your rankings to see if this is happening to you too.

It might be more usefull to get external links to supplemental posts to bring them back.

[Chatmaster]

Well I agree with linking to old blog posts from new ones, Matt does that as much as he possibly could on his own blog. Thinking about it logcally makes me think that by linking to those posts you are telling Google that those posts are still current, applicable and in a way "fresh" so that could possibly be a solution. At the end of the day we are thumb sucking for an answer, but I see this as a ideal oppertunity to figure out a possible solution. Please do so and link to the old posts, lets see what happens.

[Paz]

Everyone's given some good suggestions on how to get pages out of the supplemental index, I just thought it might be nice to give a practical example of how rankings can tank when key pages fall in it. I'm also going to argue that a loss of rankings isn't a penalty - not in a strict sense anyway.

I have a friend with a site that's been ranking #1 in Google UK for "land developer" for the last few months and has been in the top 5 results since Nov 2006.

Suddenly this term disappeared in Google, but other terms were better than ever. There had been glitches with this specific keyword before so we waited but this time it was out.... not even in the top 850 results.

A quick site check revealed that the page that used to rank had gone into Google's supplemental index, or B index as I call it these days;

http://www.digital-m.co.za/images/site-search.gif

Once a page goes into the supplemental index, it won't rank if Google can find enough results from it's main index. What's the point in wasting CPU time and resources looking in a B index of stale pages if Google has plenty of results in the main index to choose from?

We can reduce the number of competing results from 12 million to "only" 1.2 million results by adding an extra keyword and searching for "land developer Edinburgh";

http://www.digital-m.co.za/images/land-developer-edinburgh.gif

and you can see we're in at #5.

We can't be certain but it's as though Google's c. 1 million results isn't enough and they have to dig out pages from their B index and our page gets a chance to shine.

Here's the rub though. This isn't strictly a penalty.

I'm sure the page still has an excellent, pre-determined score for "land developer", just as it does for "land developer Edinburgh". The page isn't penalised, as it would be if it were using hidden text, for example, it's just that the page is never called on for competitive searches because it's not in the main index.

Mind you my friend's seen all her traffic dry up for that keyword phrase... she's certainly feeling pretty penalised, but I would say that for SEO she has an issue with supplemental pages, rather than penalised. Penalised should only be used to describe a page that's lost rankings because of hidden text, keyword stuffing etc.

Anyway, Sadie's on the case getting deep links to that page and we're trying to get the owner do a bit more with the on-site content. The site has other supplemental pages so it's probably not just an issue with a single page; but let's see what happens!