As FrankenGoogle (Dr Frankenstein’s evil search engine designing twin) works in his laboratory creating new monsters to cause us poor webmasters to shiver, many start to wonder if one of the latest ones has struck their website.

The Google Supplemental Index:
How do I know that’s happened to me?
Is it a bad Thing?
How do I get OUT!?

How do I know that’s happened to me?

Well, it is pretty easy to find out. *****

Using Google’s advanced search operator “site:” you can view all of the pages that Google has indexed for your site. If you find the words “Supplemental Result” under any of the pages that you would really like to have show up in the searches, then yes the monster has struck.

Is this a bad thing?
YES! Two things happen when a page gets demoted to supplemental
1. The page stops showing in the search engine results (SERPS), or is dropped so low that it would never get seen. Pages in the supplemental index only get displayed when nothing can be found in the main index that would fit. In most cases that means not being shown at all. It seems there might be an occasional exception to this rule, however don’t count on it happening to you.
2. Google dramatically slows down the spidering of that page. This could mean 4-6 months before Google looks at the page again to see if the problem that caused it to go supplemental was fixed. Mr. Cutts of Google, said that they are working on decreasing time between search engine visits on supplemental pages, but for now, that means a long wait to get your page producing again.

Often by using the “site:” operator, you can get an idea why Google decided to move the page into the supplementals. Often you will see the same page listed twice with only a minor difference in the url. One example I have found on one of my sites is Google listing a page twice only because someone linked to it using capital letters. One page was listed “/FAQ.html” and the other “/faq.html”. In most cases this only causes one of the pages to be supplemental and the other was in the main index, but it shows the extent of their problem.

You can also find trends as to what pages Google has choose to move to supplemental on your site. For example, one of my sites uses a dynamic URL to display various products. I was creating new pages with plenty of original text on the page, however I was not changing the meta title of each page. After fixing this problem I was able to get my pages back into the normal index.

Interesting though, I have several sites that use the same design, different text, product, and of course visual design, but the background code that creates the dynamic pages is the same. Google never got around to dropping the other sites into the supplemental (I quickly fixed them when I found out!). A point to note here is that Google is not applying this consistently, What may cause one site to go into the supplemental index may not be enough to get another one put there.

It seems evident that sometimes it might take several little things to make Google to make that fateful decision. So if your site is in the wrong index, look for everything that may have caused to be put there.

In my next blog Part 3 “FrankenGoogle ‘Man Or Myth’” I will discuss how to get out of the clutches of the evil monster “Supplemental Index”.

If you missed part 1 you can find it at FrankenGoogle cooks up another monster.

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