Supplemental Index not a "Bad" Thing.

For those of you who haven't seen this recent comment by Matt Cutts on his blog...

Not only is the supplemental index not neccessarily a bad thing, it's not a "lifelong sentance" either. This is an important change since adding quality inbound links to the page/site will enable it to come out of the supplemental index.

This appears to be a dramatic change from the past.

Additionally, Matts comments, at the very least, indicate that Google is purposely limiting the number of pages in the regular index. This lends further credence to them not having enough space or limiting the amount of space they are using for their index.

Dave

 

Dave,

I'm glad you brought this up.

I think what we can gleen from this is:

1) Supplimental is not the same as it was before
2) Rather than list entire sites, due to space, they will list the home page, crawl it regularly, then list the other pages as supplimental and crawl less frequently.
3) The amount of links to the site dictate how much will be in the main index, nothing to do with spam penalty, meta tags or any of that other speculation found on WMW.

Of course this just plays right into the hands of the subdomain spammers hands, and explains the growth of it. Since they will not deep index a site anymore without tons of links, but will index the homepage with fewer links, why not just build 100,000 one page sites, and get the same benefit of a single site with 100,000 pages.

Google, please go buy some servers and start indexing the worlds current information again, not archiving it, we've already got the way-back-machine for that.

 

Some of us prefer to actually work on our sites rather than neglecting them and spending the whole time trying to get other sites to link to us.

Surely google can come up with a more intelligent way to rank sites...at the moment, imo, this system only serves to reward spammers and old established sites.

 

Well it doesnt seem to be a problem for this spammer.

 

well as i see it these days, having pages in the supplemental index is way better than not being in the index at all.

 

Remember, links are just a way for Google to cheat. It is a way for them to "determine" (aka Guessing) what sites are about without REALLY understanding what they are about. So - 1000 links with anchor of "text links" - google cheats and says - that page is about "text links".

I feel your pain and I am sure there is a couple of college kids in a garage somewhere working on the Google killer.

 

Great post!

 

IMHO i see it as a bad thing if it affects the majority of pages on the site then it should be rectified asap.

I don't know how to fix it as I have this pending problem as well.

Why is it bad?
From experience. New pages/content that I have created go straight to supplemental index. Not much point in me creating content if it can't get to ranked in the normal index.

 

When Google started messing up and dropping pages like crazy the pages that were left from my site were in the supplemental index. But the thing is my Google traffic doubled. Now I've got 11,000 pages indexed and only my front page is not supplemental. I've never had this much Google traffic though (to my supplemental pages) and when doing searches for keywords I find that my supplementals are often ranked higher than competitors "regular" pages.

I'm not longer scared about the supps as long as they keep bringing me traffic.

 

Actually eatonweb is one of the oldest blog directories with a ton of backlinks

 

Well that explains why its not having problems with the sup results.

On a different note, that is one of the worst directories I have ever seen no wonder I seen it as spam. Cheers for pointing it out.

 

If what is being said by Matt about the SI is accurate, then it's about creating links as well as content. It's simply not good enough to to create new pages and content. It has to be "popular" content as well.

This brings to bear another point. If the size of the index is being "regulated" by links, then it's likely to be a "sliding scale". Pages moving back and forth between the RI and the SI, something that was happening early on in the BD rollout, lends credence to the threshhold not being stationary.

Dave

 

i'm so happy to read this . i have so many suplemental index

 

Tell that to everyone's traffic.. lol.

 

I completely disagree with the initial post.

Being in the supplemental results is a bad thing as far as rankings, keywords and getting eyeballs to your website is concerned.

Essentially, a supplemental listing is listing purgatory. Waiting for something, someone or something to save it.

There is a very specific way to get pages out of the supplemental and into the SE Stew pot.

 

Okay, let me ask you a "which would you rather?" question:

Would you rather have 50 pages in the regular index (out of a 40,000 page website)?

OR

Would you rather have 16,000 pages in the supplemental index (out of the same 40,000 page website)?

 

Supplemental index is a bad thing when you have spent a whole year trying unsuccesful to remove such results from Google after lost a domain name, still linked to your actual high rank sites, that someone else grabbed to profit on with popups or resell it to you at astronomical price

And the worst is that whois.sc is listing such type of domains with the new owner's information and actual screeshot, but using all keywords, description, and favicon belonging to the original owner

 

Why don't you share with the community just what that is...? Specifically.

 

Ok, I do not know what is going on with Google, but I work with some web design companies and sites that just got indexed - with new content/nothing copied and unique everything- are being listed as supplemental. Maybe this is temporary and a result of whatever update is going on.

 

They can have the newest, most unique content known to man, but if my impressions and understanding of how part of the crawling/indexing thresholds now work, without the proper link popularity, those pages will remain in the SI.

Dave