Google "Supplemental Hell" and paid links

Google Hell?
By Matt Cutts
Tue, May 1 2007

Andy Greenberg wrote an article for Forbes entitled Condemned To Google Hell about supplemental results... Itâ€™s easy to read the article and come away with the impression that Googleâ€™s supplemental results are some sort of search engine dungeon where bad pages go and sit in limbo forever, and thatâ€™s just not true.

I did some quick searching, and this post from January includes a pretty good rebuttal of the â€œyou get into supplemental results for spamming or duplicate content, and then your pages stay there for a long timeâ€ idea. Iâ€™ll quote the most relevant paragraph:

As a reminder, supplemental results arenâ€™t something to be afraid of; Iâ€™ve got pages from my site in the supplemental results, for example. A complete software rewrite of the infrastructure for supplemental results launched in Summer oâ€™ 2005, and the supplemental results continue to get fresher. Having urls in the supplemental results doesnâ€™t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now theyâ€™re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach Iâ€™d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).
That statement still holds. Itâ€™s perfectly normal for a website to have pages in our main web index and our supplemental index. If a page doesnâ€™t have enough PageRank to be included in our main web index, the supplemental results represent an additional chance for users to find that page, as opposed to Google not indexing the page.

Okay, so thatâ€™s the general advice Iâ€™d highlight. It can also be the case that links that used to carry more weight for a website might not be counting as much. Letâ€™s see if we can find an example of that in the article. Hereâ€™s a quote:

MySolitaire.com, another online diamond business, spent January to June of 2006 in the supplemental index. Amit Jhalani, the siteâ€™s vice president of search marketing, says he figures that cost his business $250,000 in sales, and he says he still doesnâ€™t know why the siteâ€™s pages got Googleâ€™s thumbs-down.

â€œSo many of the rules are vague,â€ Jhalani says. But he admits that he tried gray-area tactics like buying links from more established sites to juice his traffic.
Okay, so the VP of SEM for this site mentions that they tried buying links; maybe those links started to count for less. I decided to check into mysolitaire.com and see if I could find any other links that might have started counting for less. I did find a spam report where someone forwarded an email that appeared to be from mysolitaire.com...

A quick Google search finds similar emails that were sent to mailing lists. Reciprocal links by themselves arenâ€™t automatically bad, but weâ€™ve communicated before that there is such a thing as excessive reciprocal linking. ...

As Google changes algorithms over time, excessive reciprocal links will probably carry less weight. That could also account for a site having more pages in supplemental results if excessive reciprocal links (or other link-building techniques) begin to be counted less. As I said in January: â€œThe approach Iâ€™d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g., editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).â€

I thought Andy Beal had an interesting take on the Forbes piece as well
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Google "Supplemental Hell" and paid links

minstrel Illustrious Member

johnweb Peon

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Google "Supplemental Hell" and paid links

minstrel Illustrious Member

johnweb Peon

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