Is Your Website in Google's "Second-Rate" Index?

What you need to know about Google's Supplemental Index.

What is Google's Supplemental Index and is it "Second-Rate"?

If you do enough searching, you'll eventually see listings on Google's search results pages tagged as "Supplemental Result" outlined in red. Google created this separate index to lessen the load on its spiders. Web pages that the Google algorithm deems as inferior are relegated to this secondary index, which is rarely, or never, crawled (Google won't say).

Nice-speak Google doesn't "say" the Supplemental Result's pages are inferior, but there's been a lot of chatter in SEO-land on the subject. The bottom line is that web pages shunted off here are rarely seen, rarely re-indexed, and rank poorly. And being marked as "supplemental" creates the impression of second-rate status, which effectively lowers the level of trust that users put in these pages. A recent Forbes article, "Condemned to Google Hell," even recounts tales of heavy revenue losses from a couple of companies whose sites ended up in the supplemental index.

How do Web Pages End Up as Supplemental?

Never one to disclose, Google borders from mum to garbled on how the determination is made to send pages to second-class status. Key page faults appear to be:

• little or no content (or duplicate content) on pages
• orphaned web pages (not being linked to within your site)
• poor-quality or mostly reciprocal links (no separate quality inbound links)
• dynamically generated pages (from a database or content management system)

How to Find Out if Your Web Pages are Listed as Supplemental

There are a couple of ways that you can search in Google to see if your site has any pages cached in the supplemental index. For smaller websites, you can enter the following in Google's search: site:www.yourwebsite.com. Scroll through the results to see if any of your pages are marked "Supplemental Result." Alternatively, you can enter the following: site:www.yourwebsite.com *** -rjnkl (or any five letters). This lists only the supplemental results. Caution: Sometimes, rerunning this search string doesn't return the same results; occasionally, search strings are temporarily blocked.

How Do I Get My Web Pages Out of the Supplemental Index?

Now you know you don't want your pages in Google's supplemental index, and you've identified any pages so marked. So, how do you get them out of there? Take a careful look at these pages, and see if they have any of the page faults listed above. Here are some ways to correct their flaws.

Pages with little or no content: Add more, relevant, non-duplicated content. Blogs often end up as supplemental because they are frequently quite brief.

Pages with duplicate content: If there is duplicate content not for public view, such as print-formatted pages, be sure to include robots text that contains "no follow" spider instructions. Otherwise, be sure your content is unique and not duplicated elsewhere online.

Pages that are orphaned: Be sure these pages are linked to within your site; or, if they are not for public consumption, include the "no follow" robots text.

Website links are mostly reciprocal or low-quality: Google penalizes low-quality links. Make sure you're not participating in bulk link purchasing plans. Reciprocal links are also frowned upon (link trading). Easier-said-than-done is to obtain quality inbound links to your pages. You must provide information worth linking to!

Page title and description meta tags are all the same: Make sure each web page's title and description meta tag are included and are unique. If all your web page titles are "Your Business Name," or worse, "Page Title" or "Browser Name" (no title at all), fix them fast. And make sure your meta descriptions are keyword-rich and relevant to the page content.

After you've made all these fixes, resubmit your site to Google, and add a Google Site Map. Keep these good web page practices in mind when adding new pages or making changes to your website.

About Cool Plum Design

Cool Plum Design is a full-service web design business. We work with clients throughout the United States who need to represent their business online. We offer quality, customer-focused solutions integrating design, functionality, and content.

Share This Article

Copyright 2007 - Cool Plum Design. All rights reserved. You are free to use material from this article in whole, or in part, as long as you include the complete attribution below:

"By Cool Plum Design. Cool Plum Design offers complete website solutions integrating design, functionality, and content. Visit our website at www.coolplumdesign to learn more about Websites That Make Sense." (Make sure the link is live if placed online.)

To receive new articles each month, subscribe to our free newsletter, Making Sense. The newsletter includes articles and resource tips on business, marketing, websites, and more.