What are Google supplemental results? Do they affect you?

You might have come across this topic on various other tech/seo blogs, but what prompted me to write this article is that - they all seem too techie to me, so i’m guessing it’s not reached all the bloggers yet. And this is my attempt to reach all the non-techie bloggers on what are Google supplemental results and how they are affecting an ordinary blogger..

By ordinary bloggers(no offense please) i mean passionate bloggers, who wouldn’t want to tweak the HTML code for search engine optimization but who doesn’t want to get into trouble as well due to any ignorance on SEO.

So, what are the Google Supplemental results?

When you search for a term(keyword) on google, you get results from many websites on the same topic/term.Right?
Suppose, there is a website called cats-dogs.com. It has information on “cats” as well as “dogs”. So when you search for cats, the pages on the site with information on cats are shown on the results page. but when you search for dogs the site does not come up at all.

Or simpler yet - Google sometimes think that some of the pages on your website(here cats) is not as important as other pages(dogs) on the same website. They are seen with different weightage and pages with less or no importance are kept in a separate “folder” called supplemental results - which will not be shown on the google’s results page at all.

So in the above example, if there are two pages cats.html and dogs.html on the same website, dogs.html will not be considered at all to be

shown when some one is searching for “dogs” on google, while cats.html will be shown for searches on “cats”.

So two types of pages on a site - 1) Normal Index and 2) Supplemental index. Get the idea?

Now, if you want to see how many pages on your site are in the supplemental results category, just use this query at the google search.

site:www.yourblog.com *** -view (note that there is blank space before and after those three stars)

Every search result that appears on the results page now has this green tag on it which says - supplemental results.
Now you have an idea on what pages in your site will not be considered to be shown on the google search results.

Now, there’s nothing to panic. Having supplemental results on google is but natural. For example, if you check with the above query on how many pages are supplementary on google, you will be surprised. Search for site:www.google.com *** -view

What causes supplementary pages on your blog?

1 - Google thinks there is duplicate content on your blog.
It needn’t be true but if Google thinks that some of the pages in your site are having the same content, they may place them in the supplemental results.

2 - Short posts or posts with less content.
If you have posts that are very short, it is likely that google cannot make out the real content of the page, and when you have several short posts, then it is more likely that they are labelled as supplementary pages, because google simply doesn’t know what your pages content is.

3 - Template generated pages.
This is applicable to websites that generate many pages using the same template and very less change in content among thm.Since the same template is used, the content will be repeated on every single page.

4 - Non usage of meta tags.
If you haven’t used meta tags properly on your blog, bots will have trouble detecting their content from the body alone, so they may push those pages to the supplemental index.

5 - Poor linking structure.
This may be the most significant point out of all.
If you have a chunk of template generated pages or some pages that you didn’t care to link since you posted them, may be ignored due to the fact that they are redundant and have not been linked(external and internal). For this reason, google thinks these pages are less important and pushes them to supplemental index.

6 - Inequal distribution of PR.
Another important one. As i have said in another post, internal linking is very important because, you don’t want your valuable content to be ignore just because you don’t promote them yourself. It is quite natural that the wonderful piece of information you wrote in your early blogging days had not been read by anyone, so it’s your responsibility to link to it in one of your new posts, so that people read it.
This also distributes your blogs page rank in an equal fashion to all the posts, new and old. If you miss to do this, certain pages would have higher PR and some less PR.
Since google sees a pages importance on the basis of PR, make sure that none of your pages is deprived of Page Rank.

So those six points shows us that yes - supplemental pages are quite natural and any site can get it(even google).

Let’s see how we can get out of this, or stay away from getting supplemental index on your blog.

1 - Practice good internal linking.
Make sure even your oldest post is linked once in another post, and read by users.Maintain a column of best posts from your archives on the sidebar for quick access.

2 - Get quality inbound links to your blog from other sites.
This is the most repeated statement on the blogosphere these days - Write quality content rich articles and gain incoming links. Well, nobody says how patience is required for this and nobody can guarantee you anything. But hey, it is an important point.

3 - Categories
When you post articles, make sure that you don’t tag them into more than one category. If you do this way, it creates duplicate entry in each category and the chances of those pages landing in the supplemental index is high.

4 - Don’t encourage duplicate content
When you post an article, make sure that it’s not a repetition of what you had posted earlier. If it is, make the necessary changes in it’s text content so that it seems different from the old article. May be add more of a different keyword in it.

So, that brings us to the end of this article - What is supplemental index, why does it happen and how can you get of it or stay away from it. I hope this was a easy to understand article and not as techie as many other articles on it is. So check today, if you have any supplemental index pages on your blog, and pull your socks up to fight them out.

References - Matt Cutts Search Engine guide Google groups Seobook

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