Supplemental Results Index
When the supplemental index was first launched Google labeled the supplemental results. SEOs came up with hacks for figuring out how many supplemental results different websites had, and after they got popular Google disabled them and removed the supplemental results label.
Google has an auxiliary index where it stores some documents it may not trust enough to include in its regular index. Supplemental search results are used to provide search results when not enough regular search results are available. Why do sites get put in the supplemental results?
- Too much content for the amount of PageRank the site has. If a PR2 ite has 100,000 pages Google isn't going to index most of them.
- Newness. If a site is new and does not have many inbound links, some of its pages may end up in the supplemental results until the site builds up its popularity and ages a bit. This is typical for some new URLs that have not been crawled yet.
- Duplicate content. For example, giving a search engine multiple URLs with the same content or a directory full of empty categories with near similar content on every page
- Too many variables in the URL
- Host was down when Google tried to crawl
- Too many low-quality outbound links
- Too many low-quality inbound links
- Any combination of the above
Since pages in the supplemental results are not trusted as much as pages in the regular index, it is likely that Google rarely crawls and places low or no weight on links from many of the pages in the supplemental results.
Originally posted 2008-05-29 00:12:06.
Popularity: 3% [?]
