i know that supplemental index are for content that is not original. the products pages in my site are in supplemental index right now. i copied them from the manufacturers, but did some rewriting. obviously, i didn't do a gd job and got in there. what i don't understand is why some established websites uses duplicated content and do not get in supplemental index. i seen tutorial sites on photoshop (they usually work like articles directory, submit a tutorial to them for a backlink) having duplicated pages, but are not in supplement. another good example is the company i work for, i am doing the webpages so i know its all 100% duplicated. its all copy and paste, no change in content. for obvious reasons, i shall not post the url. the site has 1000+ pages indexed by google (i estimated only 60 pages are original) and yet none is in supplemental index! the site is PR5 and is around 10 years old. so whats this all about? older sites and high PR get away with duplicated content? not that i am complaining, just want to know whether i should rewrite my products page (kind of hard since its not mine product) or just wait it out and see if its due to sandbox/PR/watever reason? my site has little backlinks btw, could be another reason?
The supplimental index isn't for content that's not original. It's for pages that Google deems not worthy, or of high enough quality to get into the main index. The established sites have enough overall trust from the search engines for their pages no to fall into the supp. index even with duplicate content.
I don’t see to big a problem with copied product descriptions but I would add unique title and description tags for each product. Getting trusted links to your site is the way to go.
Read Matt Cutt's blog post on supplemental results. "the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank" Not enough PR -> supplemental index. One potential problem is if you have a large number of pages. Your site might not give them all enough page rank. One way to deal with it would be to reduce the number of different pages on your site.
thx alot. wow, i learn new things everytime i post here. i always thought supplemental index are for duplicated content. have a question to ask regarding reducing the number of pages. i have a few pages that are not active (change the url to better keywords) but are cached by google. so do i remove them or leave them there? i had a link to point it to the new page, hoping it gets cached faster. should i remove these pages? i read somewhere in this forum that more worthless pages actually reduce crawl rate.
301 those pages to pages that provide the same content. That will clean them out of Google's index over a couple of months. It will increase the crawl of pages you redirect to and if there were any external links to those pages, it will pass the PR.