Google Supplemental Results and how to get out
of them
Published: 7th February 2007
If you’ve ever checked how your site is doing with
Google by typing the ‘site:www.yourdomainname.com’ into
the search box, you may have wondered about the term ‘Supplemental
Result’ tagged onto some of your web site’s
pages.
But what exactly is a ‘Supplemental Result’ and
what makes it different from normal results?
According to Google’s Webmaster Help Center,
a Supplemental Result is one which is no longer part of
the regular index, but has been placed in a Supplemental
Index which places less constraints on pages being crawled.
The upshot is that any page in the Supplemental Index
will no longer be shown in the regular search
results (unless there very few regular results for a query).
From a webmaster’s point of view, this is not good
news, as the site will be missing out on a large number
of potential visitors by being dumped from the regular
results.
So what causes your pages to be relegated to Supplemental
Purgatory and what can you do to get them back out and
into Google’s regular index once more?
First and foremost, you have to consider your site’s
age
If yours is a virgin site, with very few inbound links,
there is no real cause for concern, so long as you get
yourself out there and start building incoming links in
a natural and ethical way.
The watchword here is ‘natural’, since you
should religiously avoid link farms, spam directories
or trailer-trash neighbourhoods of the internet.
Another major consideration is duplicate content
If your web site contains a lot of pages which have little
in the way of unique content, are simply filled with
information taken from other places on the web or present
very similar content again and again, you need to be
thinking about creating fresh content to add visitor
value to your site.
High-Quality, original content is (and always has been)
king and Google will reward you if you use plenty of it,
so replace the duplicate content with something you’ve
written yourself.
Did I mention the importance of inbound links?
A few years ago, the catch-phrase was: “Get as many
links as you can.”
This no longer applies, although some SEO companies would
have their customers believe otherwise. Google distinguishes
quite clearly between links which ‘carry weight’ and
those that don’t. If your site has a load of inbound
links from bad parts of the web (we’ve all seen
them, junk directories with very little content and a
lot of adverts), Google’s trust in your site is
lessened. Conversely, just a few links from respected
sites will do yours a power of good.
W3C Compliance is also important
Although Google does not require W3C
compliance by default,
clean code will help your site to perform better in the
rankings; with other engines too.
As long as you follow the above steps and stick to the
Google
Webmaster Guidelines, there should be nothing stopping
you from getting your site back into the regular index.
How to escape the Google Supplemental Results
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