Google Supplemental Page Index and site age.

Hello. I have been reading through a lot of the posts on this site regarding 'escaping' from the Google Supplemental Page Index. I have read many tips to help do this such as unique content/meta tags and deep linked backlinks etc.

I have one question that I would like to seek consensus on:

All other factors being equal, does the age of a website/domain play a part in the number of pages that will be listed in the main index?

For instance I am currently working on a site that has many pages that continually switch between the main index and the supplemental index. Some of these pages rank no1 for their target phrase when they are listed and return a high volume of traffic. However these same pages may drop back into the supplemental pages for a few days without returning any traffic at all before reappearing at the no1 slot a few days later.

From my observations it would appear that at any one time only a certain number of these pages are permitted into the main index and there is a certain amount of luck as to which ones they are.

I have read one theory that as the homepage is currently only PR3 only a certain number of pages will be 'allowed' in the main index. IF this is the case, and while the site remains PR3, is the the number of 'allowed' pages likely to increase with time? (considering this site is only a few months old).

Many Thanks

 

On domains older than 2003 supplemental results do not occur. In all other cases, the most important factor is the number of the backward links to the site. The more trust you have the less number of pages falling into the supplemental results.

 

Age of domain has nothing to do with it, i've got a 12yo domain with some supp pages and a few months old PR3 domain with none of the 140 something pages in supp.

 

In order to get these pages out of supplemental you need to get deep links to them....don't worry about pages being in supplemental too much......just make sure your important pages are not in supplemental

 

Thanks for all the replies so far.

I know the official Google line is "don't worry too much about being in the supplemental index etc" but in practice it make a huge difference when a page that would otherwise rank no1 for a given search phrase can suddenly no longer be found.

I understand the theory that deep links can help and will certainly seek to develop them where possible. In reality though it is not always practicable to obtain backlinks for every page in a large website.

I also run a couple of forums and have found that search engine referrals have reduced in the last few months due to more pages dropping into the supplemental index. I haven't made any changes to the forum structure recently so it appears to me that something has changed in the way that the appropriate index is allocated.

 

Not too sure, I think that the ratio of code to text is important, have unique text on each page and meta tags and keep the code to a minimum, this has always helped me to get out of supp.

 

there is only one think that you can do to avoid from supp. results.

it's getting more and more deep backlinks

 

Thanks for that.

Are you saying that individual pages need backlinks to themselves to escape the supplemental index or does a large amount of backlinks in general result in a higher number of pages in the main index (not necessarily the ones the backlinks point to).

For example, I am wondering how huge sites like Wikipedia get such good results for the majority of their articles. I find it hard to believe each new article has backlinks to it. Does Wikipedia not have some sort of 'trust' level that allows a large majority of its articles to go straight into the main index.