site:host.com host.com Or check the API. It still shows non-supp pages. They've just removed the label. Just as many of your pages are in SUPP as they used to be. You just can't see which ones now. Which makes it harder to know why they are supplemental.
Traffic to supplemental pages is nearly nil. I do agree that with larger sites it is almost impossible to get entirely out of the supplemental. But if you want your pages to rank they are going to have to be out of the supplemental.
Supp was a good thing in my eye, it identified pages that needed further work, the best way is to create pages that never go in there though, personally I'll miss it!!!
Supplemental pages get an extremely small fraction of views in the search engines by their very nature. So treating it as if it means nothing is just plain silly IMO. What's even sillier is that you made that statement while having SEO in your username... Exactly... The only good news in that announcement was this:
Its actually a BAD NEWS for we SEO's They have just stopped displaying the tag ... and the pages will still be in supp. but only google will know... and thus we SEO's will never come to know why a site is not ranking and keep on making guesses No worries ... this will only help the best people to survive as per Darwins theory of "Survival of the fittest"
Google is trying to make it harder for SEO guys, that's it. Supplementals will stay where they are there just will be notice about it in SERPs this is my opinion on this. In two words: BAD NEWS
Now, with this fix, a webmaster wont know if there are or not pages in supplemetant results. But if the # of indexed pages is 20% less then the website has...then there are pages in supplemental but not showing.
As an SEO firm, this might be a good thing, because now your customers won't know (just like you won't know) that those pages aren't doing that great.
One site i own had 5 pages from 500 in the Supplemental index, when doing a site:www.domain.com these pages always showed last and they still do just without the tag. So you could conclude the last pages in a site: query are Supp, so to correct them you would just need to work from the last result backwards through your pages fixing the most important ones. Try that approach.
Working on pages and better links is to game the system, if it's your goal is to get higher serps. That's what 99% of people here do.
Ok, supplementals are history now. That solves many problems for SEOs in regarding to their clients. Because nobody can figure out whether the pages are in supplemental index or not. But in the same time it is harder for us to research our work and to fight google. So all of us have to think about QUALITY again, now it becomes the key factor.