Supplemental results

You may or may not have heard of Google's supplemental results index.

It's quite a magical thing - because now it has become invisible!

But what is the supplemental index?

How can you find out if any of your pages are in it?

And what should you do about it?

Google's supplemental index

Google has a secondary index, too, called the supplemental index. Until the end of July 2007, you could spot which pages of your site were in the supplemental index.

You simply brought up a list of Google's indexed pages of your site by searching for

site:www.websitetrafficideas.com

- replacing my domain name with your own - and you could check each result for the the phrase supplemental result written in green underneath the description of a site, next to the URL.

However, Google has now removed that useful little green label. The supplemental index still exists - but you don't know which of your pages are in it.

Google's info concerning supplemental results told us this (I've removed the link as the page this was quoted from has now disappeared):

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

Read Google's update on supplemental results "going mainstream" here.

For surfers, yes, a supplemental result is a result - so no problem.

For webmasters, however, having pages from your site in the supplemental index and not the main index can be rather depressing.

Why?

Because pages in the supplemental index rarely show up on search engine results pages, and you'll hardly get any visitors from Google.

How can you find out if your pages are in the supplemental results index?

• if you can see that a page is indexed by Google by using the "site" command above
• if you can see that that page's Page Rank bar is greyed out
• and if you are getting little or no Google traffic to that page by looking at your traffic stats

then it could be a fair bet that the page is supplemental.

In my experience, having some pages of your site in the supplemental index is quite normal. However, if your site is getting very little Google traffic even to major pages, and you can see you are not ranking for your carefully built keyword focused pages - then you may be sitting in the supplemental doldrums and you're going to want to know what to do about it.

Getting out of the (now invisible) supplemental results index

1. Check for duplicate content on your site. If you have pages with reprinted articles, for example, you might want to think about either removing them or telling the search engines not to index those pages by using a Meta Robots noindex tag.

2. Check whether your site has had its original content stolen by another site - without you knowing. This can affect your rankings. Check for theft of your website content at Copyscape.

3. Review your site's internal linking - the navigation around your site. Do you have any pages that aren't linked to? Try and link to every page twice. More info on how to do this on my page about improving search engine ranks by organizing your pages.

4. Review links into and out of your site. You can't control links into your site, unless you've set up inbound links from link farms or paid link schemes... which Google doesn't like.

   When linking out - only link to quality sites.

5. Make sure the URLs or web page addresses are search engine friendly. Using too many parameters (those bits of a URL that have symbols such as ? or &ID= for example) could be affecting indexing.

6. Make sure each page has its own individual title and description. See my tips on meta tags optimization for more detail.

7. Add more content. Find pages thin on content and spruce them up. Freshen up content on older pages. And start adding pages regularly to your website. If you have a site blog, so much the better - keep it up to date with new information.

8. Get some fresh, good links into your site - links to suspect supplemental pages (often those pages deeper within your site) could help. Find practical ideas in this section about link building.

9. Check Google's webmaster guidelines. They mention many of the things talked about on this page.

   One of their recommendations is to...

10. Submit a sitemap - the guidelines state that Google "uses your sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages."

Life after supplementals

• write more good content

• get more good links in

Google's supplemental results have achieved a kind of cult status among webmasters for all the wrong reasons. But you don't have to suffer - if you take action.