Google Supplemental Results and Marketing Tom

Over the past month I have noticed that a high number of the 400-500+ pages on this site which were previously indexed on this site have now been moved into supplemental results - in fact only 100 pages now exist on the Google index. Here is what Google has to say about supplemental results:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index. The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears.

According to Jim Boykin this is what it generally means to you and me if our site ends up in "Supplemental":

Pages from the "regular" index will almost always show up first for any searches. The only time you’ll usually see "supplimental results" is if there’s not many, or any, results in the regular index. What this means, is that if you’re page about "blue widgets" is in the "Supplemental Results" then you’re screwed as far as having your page rank at all (will not show up at all since there’s pleanty of results for "blue widgets" in a google search. Your only chance of rankings a page that’s in the supplimental results is if someone searched for something super specific like "blue widgets in southbend kansas on market street").

Supplemental Results also tend to have old Google Caches…..in other words, once google has sent them to "Google Hell", they tend not to come back….thus you’ll find pages in the Supplemental Results are dated long ago.

Shit!

Jim identifies 3 main reasons:

1. Duplicate Content - take someone elses content, get sent to Google Hell (Supplemental Results)
2. No Content - create pages with no content (remember the days of directories that would create 1 million pages with only 100 listing?) - empty pages get sent to Google Hell.
3. Orphaned web pages. Pages that no one links to, including yourself.

And 3 solutions:

1. If you stole content - change it.
2. If there’s no content - add some.
3. If it’s orphaned - link to it.

There is a slight flaw in the above though, as many of these pages have links from other sites which have not only been cached but have a decent PR rating! Hang on! - a decent PR rating and cache for discussing something on my page.

Here are some of the supplementals which I will start linking to:

Keyword Links - Try not to 'Click here'!
How to Use Case Studies Properly
Podcasting From the Heart of the Catholic Church
Tracking a DMOZ Editor
Pushing the Boundaries of Podcasting
How to Get People to Complete Online Surveys
Robert Scoble and Shel Israel's Blogging Book - A Case of Open Source Book Writing?