The inconceivable has happened, your baby, that you have poured hours over, creating content, promoting in the search engine, spent sleepless nights fretting over what to add next, has stopped producing. Traffic from Google has fell through the floor. As the beads of sweat start appearing on your forehead, you wonder, “Do they think I spammed them?” “Was it that last link trade I did?” “Is this just another nightmare caused by eating cold pizza and pickles before bed?”

No, it’s quite possible you just fell victim to FrankenGoogle’s (Dr Frankenstein’s evil search engine designing twin) latest experiment. The Supplemental Index.

What is it?
How do I know that’s happened to me?
Is this a bad thing?
If so, How do I get OUT!?

What is it?
Google defines it as “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.” In reality this means that the page will no longer be displayed in the normal searches unless Google can’t find anything in the main index to return for a search, or the pages will show up so low that it might as well not exist.

It appears to be the dumping ground of any pages that Google decides is not quite right for the main index. I have found that there are a large number of things that can cause a site to start loosing pages to the supplemental index, including.

• Insufficient text on the page looks like a duplicate of other pages on your site.
• Duplicate titles on pages. Each page, whether static or dynamic should have its distinct title.
• Too many parameters in the URL. Stick to one or two, three and more gets risky.
• Different links pointing to the same page. I’ve even seen pages show with the “site:” search operator where the only difference is capitalization. ie. “FAQ.html” and “faq.html”. One shows as a supplemental the other doesn’t.
• Old pages that you site no longer links to.

All of these are reasonable and should be dropped to a supplemental. However, many webmasters have been experiencing problems where almost their whole site has become a supplemental and none of the above problems exist. Then comes the struggle to get your pages removed from supplemental and returned to the main index.

Future blogs will go over the questions.
How do I know that’s happened to me?
Is this a bad thing?
If so, How do I get OUT!?

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