Neil Shearing’s Internet Marketing Strategies

Ok, this is slightly old news, but I just found out about it.

If your pages in the Google index didn’t have much PageRank juice, they were shunted to the Supplemental Results Index. Being in the supplemental index wasn’t a penalty, as such, it just meant that Google didn’t consider your page to be important enough for their main index. A lot of people who were worried about the “duplicate content filter” were concerned that the supplemental index was a Google “dumping ground” for their pages… even though a “duplicate content filter” doesn’t exist.

Google still showed pages from the supplemental index in the search results… if they couldn’t find enough results from the main index. So if someone searched for “italian pink bamboo shoots” and yours was the only page matching that search query, your page would be shown as the only result… even if it was a page in the supplemental index.

So, the supplemental index was nothing to get worked up about… apart from the fact that Google was effectively letting you know that your pages in the supplemental index needed either more original content or more inbound links if you wanted those pages to get into the main index.

All well and good. Until Google removed the “supplemental index” notice when returning results from the supplemental index.

Google said, “Google’s technology has improved over time, and now we’re able to crawl and index sites with greater frequency. With our entire web index fresher and more up to date, the “Supplemental Results” label outlived its usefulness.

For webmasters who have used the supplemental result label as a diagnostic aid, Google encourages the use of our Webmaster Tools and also our Analytics service. These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.”

Anyone else think that smells fishy? We all know that Google crawls higher PageRank pages more often. So they must crawl lower PageRank pages less often. But according to them, they now crawl everything so frequently that there’s no need for a supplemental results index. Hmmm. What about all the oodles of duplicate content? Won’t those pages still be in a supplemental results index? I would expect so… all except the most “relevant” page… but now you just won’t know.

Also, saying that “These free services can provide you with insight into those pages that users and Google may find less relevant.” is a bit nonsensical. Just install the Google toolbar and the PageRank indicator will tell you how “relevant” the page is to Google… and hence also to its “users” because Google determines what the “users” see by primarily ordering the results according to PageRank.

Well, webmasters kicked up a fuss. You can read their replies here. What do you think?

Update: There’s more recent info from Google here. Apparently, everything Google indexes is now in one big, ahem, index. Cue lots of slapping themselves on the back, and lots of headscratching and “so what’s” from everyone else.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 12:05 pm and is filed under Current posts, PageRank, search engine tips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.