So, I was hanging out over at Matt Cutts' blog today (bad habit, I know, can't help myself sometimes though ). The conversation was about penalties, and we were talking about how some sites can get them when they don't deserve them. Someone brought up about supplemental results. Supps aren't actually penalties, they are due to a lack of PageRank to those pages, but it does bring up an interesting point that most people don't realise: a) Pages require a certain amount of PageRank to stay out of the supps b) PageRank is a relative quantity… the more pages there are, the more links it takes to get PageRank c) Therefore, the more pages factored into the equation, the harder it is to stay out of the supplementals d) Currently, Google is completely inundated with millions and millions of pages of non-supplemental spam, making it almost impossible for honest websites to stay out of the supps. I also blogged about it here, and gave examples of the spam: http://smackdown.blogsblogsblogs.co...d-links-and-priorities-slightly-out-of-whack/ In a nutshell what this means is that innocent, otherwise completely white hat, sites are almost required to buy higher PageRank links, just so they can stay indexed and out of the supplemental results. The fact that Google can't seem to deal with the spam problem means that innocent sites suffer. It's not just about spam sites outranking regular sites... in most cases they don't. But the mere existence of these millions of spam pages makes having all of those long tail filled pages indexed in such a way that people can actually find them almost impossible, ya know? Is there anyone else here who has found themselves buying links just to stay non-supp over the past year? -Michael