Web Site Promotion

Google supplemental index (SI), a la secondary search index, are not something you want to be in. About the only time you will see them is if the query is so esoteric that supplemental pages are needed to fill out the search results. Note that a page is not moved to supplemental index because of a violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines. There are several reasons why a page ends up in SI and there are several ways to get out of SI - it is not a roach motel.

View Supplemental Pages

To view your Google supplemental pages

1. Go to google.com
2. In the search bar enter

site:mysite.com ***-view
will show only the supplemental pages.

If you just enter site:mysite.com then all indexed pages are shown, including supplemental ones. The words Supplemental Result will appear near the bottom of each supplemental search result.

What are Supplemental Pages?

There are two indexes at Google: main and supplemental. Supplemental is for obscure results when no regular pages exist. Remember, search engines want to deliver the most relevant web pages as the result of a search query - generally the ones with the best content that fit the query. Of course there are several factors (over 100 in Google’s case) in determining SERP ranking.

Google’s Definition

A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.

A web page classified as supplemental will -not- show up in normal search engine queries unless the query is so obscure that normal pages do not exist.

Getting In and Out of the Supplemental Index

There are many ways to get out of the supplemental index but they are not guaranteed because many times you do not know how you got -into- it! A little research may be necessary.

* The page may be too similar to other pages on your site. Remember to look at all the text on the page and see how similar it is to other pages on your site. Don’t forget navigation counts.

* The page may be too similar to other pages on the Internet. Most of the time this is the result of copying someone else’s work.

* The page may be nested too deep in your website. This signifies unimportance as the pages near the top are deemed more relevant.

* A dynamic web page URL may have too many parameters. See how many parameters are after the question mark in the URL.

* A dynamic web page URL may vary the parameter order. This usually occurs in eCommerce stores you build yourself.

* There are not enough good external links to your site (does not include reciprocal links). Many of these links should point to pages other than your home page.

* Similarities like the same title tag for many web pages. Sometimes this cannot be avoided (well, it can by not using them) due to using third party packages such as some build it yourself eCommerce sites.

* You must decide on whether to use www or non-www in your domain name and stick with it. One must be redirected to the other. Type in yourdomain.com and see if it redirects itself to www.yourdomain.com. Here is how to redirect non-www to www on an Apache server.

* Lame META description tags. For each web page create a 2 or 3 sentence description using your best keyphrase that sound natural. The description should be relevant to the web page.

* Low PageRank. Generally if a page has low or no page rank it is for a reason which probably includes one or more listed. Remember -each- web page has its own PageRank.

Content

Face it. Quality content is the best thing one can do to alleviate the supplemental index problem. Not a sentence or two but a few relevant paragraphs of something to interest the reader. The meta description should be relevant, too, and not contain repetitive keywords. The text needs to be unique and not copied from another site.

In order to reduce confusion I think it is best to put web page in all lower-case letters. Some pages I’ve seen use the capitalize every word scheme such as mydomain.com/ThisIsMyPage.htm. This is a different URL than mydomain.com/thisismypage.htm.

Note that it takes longer for Google to revisit crawling supplemental pages than regular pages.

Conclusion

Do not get too hung up on why your pages are in supplemental. Of course follow the tips as best you can but I would spend my time creating good content and marketing my web site rather than worrying about how to get every page out of the supplemental clutch.

Doug