Are links from supplemental indexed pages downgraded?

Hi all,

I have read a lot about the supplemental index, but not on the impact of the value of links from supplemental indexed pages. So the question I have is:

Is a link from a sup. index page worth the same as a link from a none sup. index page?

I am interested in the the SERPs impact of those links, not the traffic such a link can generate directly.

 

I guess that if a page is marked as a supplemental page that won't be displayed as a result for any searching query except the site: operator.

 

Most likely a link from a supplemental page would be less valuable than a link from a regular page.

 

That shouldn't really effect how Google uses the supp results to rank the sites linked to on those pages though.

I've not heard a definitive answer, but I'm guessing if its a relevant supplemental page and a relevant link, there would be no effect. Good question though.

 

All I know is keep away from supplemental pages.

 

Sups are not normally displayed in regular search results (those with any kind of competition). However, having sups just means the pages are either duplicate or don't have enough link juice. Is doesn't reflect on your site ranking.

I know this because I have a 20 page site, which has 1 page which generates results. Google has only indexed 20 pages and MSN has indexed over 6,000 which includes all the generated result pages. Even though Google has sup'd all these pages, the site still ranks very well.

 

Patrick,

Not sure if you believe everything Matt Cutt has to say. Here's what he said about sup results on his blog on jan/07.

Direct link to quote;
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/infrastructure-status-january-2007/

Part of the info from the link is below.

 

Ok thanks for the responses so far ...

ok but why?

Does anyone have personal experience of a site losing serp for having a series of incoming links come from recently suplementaled pages?

Great spot, but what about those links coming out of this page?

 

Someone said recently (mvandemar?) that supplemental pages never get PR.
Assuming this is true, and these pages are 'off the bottom of the PR scale' then it is likely a link from a supplemental page is also right at the bottom of the importance scale.

So if it counts, it won't count for much.

But you could take the view that if someone with supplemental pages is doing link exchanges they will probably get out of supplemental soon enough.

 

I don't know. But if you type site:google.com, you will also see supplemental results. It looks like google only shows the first 1000 pages of indexed pages, what happens to the rest indexed pages.

 

ok I just did a site command on matt cutts blog.

this page is in the supplemental index

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-clean-house-before-press-releases/

and it has pr.

Soooo, anyone else care to add there view on this.

 

Very interesting. Just confirms thoughts for me that G's continued use of PR is to mislead SEO. ... and if PR has no relevance on SERPs then why are so many people chasing PR?

As to the original question, IMO don't focus so much on pr, you have to check other more important link factors to optimise in SERPs.

 

Thanks Gordano for the advice, ....

but the question still stands!

 

My guess is that it is not counted as much.....

 

All right I'm going to throw a wrench into this whole discussion, pages can be both supplemental and not-supplemental.

Let's use the Matt Cutts page given before as an example:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-advice-clean-house-before-press-releases/

Here's that page, shown as supplemental in position #903 of the site: command.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:mattcutts.com&num=100&hl=en&start=900&sa=N

Modifying the site: command to "site:mattcutts.com press" we now see the same page in position #2, but not marked supplemental.

http://www.google.com/search?num=100&hl=en&q=site:mattcutts.com+press&btnG=Search

or even better a stright google search for "seo advice: clean house" where the pages shows up at #1 out of about 949,000 and not supplemental.

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+...ent-ff&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGGL,GGGL:2006-27,GGGL:en

The conclusion is that by viewing your site: results and seeing supplemental you are not seeing the whole picture, as pages in the supplemental index can also be in the regular index. It has even been said that ALL pages in the regular index are in the supplemental index, however all pages in the supplemental index are not in the regular index.

If you investigate further you'll see that the cache for both instances are the same.

In order to understand this you must consider what supplemental trully means to Google. It's just a lower crawl priority assigned to a page. Instead of crawling it daily, or weekly, they'll crawl it at the much slower pace of the supplemental index crawler. It would make sense that each and every page google considers valuable to be included in their search is assigned a supplemental crawl rate. Some Pages are then assigned a regular index crawl rate.

So the often cited phrase, "My site has gone supplemental" is not true, as the site was always supplemental, it just left the main index.

Long winded I know, but to sum up. Just because you do a site: command and see pages marked as supplemental doesn't mean that they are only supplemental. You must do further research on that page by:

1) Checking the cache date. If it's 3 months old, then its probably supplemental only.
2) Checking for natural search results. Search for terms that the page would probably rank for like a snippet of the page title I did above.
3) Refine the site: command to include a keyword that would likely reduce the amount of pages and include the page you are looking at.

All-in-all its a lot of work for no real gain in knowledge. The only real way to keep a page out of the supplemental-only (as I just renamed it) index is to get more links to it, which is something you should be working on anyway.

To address the original question. Links from supplemental pages are still links like any other link, however if it's truly a supplemental-only page than of course its going to have less weight and be updated less frequently by the very definition of supplemental. But beware of deeming a page supplemental just by looking at the site: command as it doesn't tell the whole story.

...whew!

 

I should also add this. It may appear that a link from a supplemental-only page is downgraded because of the nature of supplemental-only pages; they are crawled infrequently. So if you gain a link on supplemental-only page today, google may not crawl that page until June and therefore you won't get any credit for it until then. So checking the cache date is more of a good indicator of the inherent value of the page than visible PageRank (woefully behind) or even if it has supplemental by it in a site: search.

 

That is correct, but my statement had to do with the the state of the page when the snapshot was taken. Also, as I just added in the other thread, and as discussed below, some pages have a dual existence in, um, supplementality...?

Correct.

I'm pretty sure that's not correct. What is happening, if I am not mistaken, is that the link to cache for the non-supp page is being shown for both results, not that the actual cache is the same. I have had pages drop from the regular index, and once that happens the cache reverts back a few months.

I think that's putting the cart ahead of the horse slightly. What Matt has explained before (sorry, don't have the reference handy) supps are a results of low overall link strength. The low crawl rate is a result of being supplemental-only (and therefore only serviced by the supplemental bot), not that it is supplemental because it has a lower crawl priority.

While pages can exist and display in both indices, the main problem is that unless you are tracking closely, you don't know if a page is on its way in or on its way out. While it may be true that Google holds on to older versions of caches, I don't think that all pages exist in supp index. There are sites that you can use the site-plus-wildcard-plus-negative-match query (which shows all supps for a site) and nothing is returned.

-Michael

 

I think we agree, you just said it better than I can. Being supplemental-only=low crawl rate and low crawl rate=supplemental-only which is determined mainly by link strength.

As far as cache goes, it would follow that they have more than one version stored, as I too have seen pages change crawl date or "revert" as is often said. But I do think that when you check the cache you are seeing what Google considers to be the current condition of the page. Thus if a page yesterday had a cache date that was 3 days old but today the cache is 3 months old, then you are seeing a change in status of the page. That status could have changed because of a million different reasons, algorithim change, links devalued, links lost, bad-data-push, good-data-push, etc

All the other theories out there on getting in and out of supplemental basically support this, but in their own way. Generally it all boils down to getting more link strength to the page either externally or internally.

 

Correct. Which means, as you said before and to answer the orginal question (again ), links from supp only pages are worth way less than links from non-supp pages.

-Michael

 

Using Googles own documentation, they also mention this.
http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=34473