Google Supplemental Results

Growing technology has facilitated a much wider audience reach for the internet. A wider audience has meant that the internet now has to cater to wider sensibilities, and meet broad spectrum of requirements. There are, for instance, many people who would go online with extremely specific search queries.

And it is quite common to see searchers with specific queries are often unable to find what they are looking for. To the search engine such specific queries come across as being obscure, and it returns a small number of results. Google’s supplemental results are basically a compilation of the results of these unusual queries on a separate index page. These are pages that do not meet the criteria used for Google’s normal index.

Picture this. You are searching for an album by a certain artist. When you click search what you would want to see is not 1000s of sites, most of them giving information about buying the CD. And this is really not going to help. What you need is some amount of variety in the kind of information. Creating a separate supplemental index means that most sites that offer duplicity of information are relegated to the supplemental index which gives the user the opportunity to access sites that offer some unique content.

Essentially, rather than expand their existing index, Google decided to experiment with the use of this new system means an adoption of a two-tier system. As of now, Google has said that it has no plans of integrating the two systems. It must be mentioned, that this is not a wholly ingenious product because a similar two-tier system was earlier used by Inktomi.

Supplemental results are shown to users after the normal results are shown, which reduces the chances of a user getting few results on a particular search. At the same time this also means, that on a regular search, pages that are in the supplemental index will almost certainly not be seen by searchers. So what goes into supplemental, and why? A page may be sent to supplemental results for various reasons. Firstly, it could be because a site may have very few back links. Secondly, it could be because, according to the search engine, a lot of the content on your site is considered duplicate. Orphaned pages, those that are not linked to any other page in the site, would also find their way to the supplemental index. Another possible reason could be the lack of textual content on a page. Pages that have long files names and dashes, or those that have same meta tags, title and description on every page may also be sent into the supplemental index.

Supplemental index can thus be seen as penalizing those sites that get into unethical practices such as spamming, or are seemingly not often updated. A supplemental index is not a place of no-return necessarily. The biggest difficulty in the process of retrieving your site from the supplemental index would be identify the reason for why it was put their in the first place. A bit of introspection, and a thorough review of a site will tell you what the reasons are. Once you have identified reasons, you need to work on rectifying them. For instance, make sure there are no orphan pages, and that every site, at least internally, is linked. Additionally, enhance your content and try to increase the number of relevant links to your site.

Once you have done that, you need to inform Google of the changes so that they can crawl your site again and be assured that your site deserves to be on the normal index. Lots of webmasters are complaining about not knowing why their sites are being sent to the supplemental index. It may not be a very foolproof system, but the fear of their site being sent to the supplemental index does make webmasters more wary of unethical practices. Detractors say that this is just an extension of Google’s mistrust for newer sites, and its bias for older and bigger sites.

In the ultimate analysis, we must understand that antiquity or size of a page is not the key determinant of sites that deserve to stay in normal indexes. It cannot be emphasized enough, that Google gives a lot of importance to the quality of links you get on your website. And in order to save your site from the supplemental index, which is being referred to as Google’s hell, all you have to do is the obvious: plan, and create with the end user in mind.