What really targets "Supplemental Results"? Any Ideas?

[msaad]

Hi,
This is getting me really nervous. Some of my pages (esp. those in forums), are showing as "Supplemental Results" in Google for no obvious reason. They are just normal forum posts.

Any ideas why Google suddenly shows a page as "Supplemental Results"?

[DarrenC]

I could be wrong but I think its when you aren't linking to these pages, so G thinks that they are old pages and clears them from it's index.

[Old Welsh Guy]

I am going to upset the apple cart now. Of late, I have found that on large sites with possibl duplicate content, google first moves the 'iffy' pages to supplimental results with a cache of 1969 (server date). It then either puts them back, OR makes them partially indexed (only the url shows). If the latter, the next stage is that Google drops the pages from its index.

Google is wagin war on directories that have been set up to provide backlinks. They appear to be doing this via duplicate content filters, so directories/forums that have near duplicate content pages with the same links etc are being hit hard. Many directories have seen drops of 10,s of thousands of pages, as have some forums.

Keep an eye on those pages.

[msaad]

Oh My God. This can't be good. I already see lots of partially indexed page on my site..
But, thank you very much for the quick reply

SO, when Google sees duplicate content, does it remove BOTH? Or does it remove just ONE of them? If it removes both, this can lead to all kinds of problems for me. If just one, then I have nothing to worry about!
Which one do you think?

[DarrenC]

Does it really matter? If you have duplicate content, get rid. I've also heard of sites getting penalities for dup content, which initially worried me, but I have that sorted now.

[msaad]

It is really hard, because I have to modify phpbb itself to get rid of the duplicate content. I am not very much of a php guy. Are there any tutorials for that?

[xml]

msaad, if you use VB as your forum software this can cause supplemental results, because VB provides a few different URLs for the same thread.

[daamsie]

I'm not even sure the theory is correct. I know of another site that has supplemental results and definitely NO duplicate content - it's a very small site with only a few html pages and ALL have been labeled 'supplemental'. To me it indicates something about Google not finding that page when doing a crawl (that same site has 0 backlinks - not that that means much ;-) ). Perhaps they also flag duplicate content like that. I don't see how that would necessarily hurt your rankings though for the page that ISN'T flagged as 'supplemental'. Considering the pages are identical, only one really needs to rank :-)