By now, if you run an online website or business
you probably have heard about Google’s Supplemental
Index. You may have even heard it being referred to as
Google’s Gulag, Google’s Digital Dungeon, or the
moniker that seems to have stuck: Google Hell.Hate it or love it, webmasters are passionate about
the big G. There’s no argument on that point for a
very good reason: Google simply delivers the most
search engine traffic on the web. For any webmaster
with at least a few white SEO connected brain cells
Google can supply 60% or more of their traffic.Therefore, suddenly getting the majority of your
pages thrown into Google’s Supplemental Index can
result in a correlating drop in business. A few
examples of this were reported in a recent Forbes
article by Andy Greenberg entitled “Condemned To
Google Hell”.It recounts how two online jewelry businesses lost
traffic and sales by having their pages falling into
Google’s Supplemental Index. They speculated on what
had caused this to happen: duplicate content? buying
links?Matt Cutts, Google’s main spokesperson (some say pacifier)
to worried webmasters everywhere, responded in his own
blog:”Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean
that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main
determinant of whether a url is in our main web index
or in the supplemental index is PageRank.”However, regardless of what Google maintains, being
in the supplemental results is not a good thing for any
webmaster or business. Just the fact it’s called a
supplemental index means it’s not as important as the
main index. This index is seen as duplicate pages, less
important or less trusted by Google, thus the lower PR.All semantics aside, webmasters should try to keep
their important web pages out of this supplemental
index. Why would anyone be satisfied with having their
pages or website buried in dusty boxes in the backroom
when they want them displayed on the Front Store Window,
preferably in the #1 spot?Lately, despite webmasters’ wishes, Google seems to
be placing more emphasis on the Supplemental Index
and putting more pages there. One can only guess, but
it may have to do with improving their SERPs — the more
relevant Google’s search results become, the higher quality
their flagship product will achieve. Or it may just be
an easier way of spidering and managing all those
countless pages that exist on the web.Regardless, you do not want your pages in this Supplemental
Index unless they are really unimportant pages and these
can have the ‘no follow’ attributes in the robots txt.
However, you still need to check this supplemental index
for your own pages.Simple Way To Check Google’s Supplemental Index You can go to Google search and type in:site:www.yoursite.com *** -sjpkedreplacing ‘yoursite’ with your domain/site to see
what pages are indexed in Google’s Supplemental Index.If you see any important pages there you should
check your whole linking structure of your site.
Are these pages linked properly? Are they orphaned?
Are they well positioned in your internal site
architecture? If there are obvious interior
linking problems with these pages, fix them.It is also a good idea to see what percentage
of your pages are in this index.How To Calculate Your Supplemental Index RatioYou can get your percentage of Supplemental results
by dividing the number of pages in the supplemental
index by the total number of pages in the main index.site:www.yoursite.com *** -sjpked___________________________________site:www.yoursite.comThis will give you a good indication of the overall
health of your site. If you have too high a ratio
or too many pages in the supplemental index you
should fix your site’s linking structure and remove
duplicate pages. Make sure robots can crawl all of
your pages or at least the ones you want them to crawl.If you do find your site or too many of your pages
in Google’s Digital Attic, simply try to increase
the PageRank of those pages. This is the main remedy
supplied by Matt Cutts:”The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use
solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g.
editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”In other words, raise your PageRank to get those pages
out of the supplemental index. This has always been
the basic key to getting traffic from Google. Quality
content plus quality links equals quality traffic from
Google.Likewise: QC + QL = No Supplemental IndexIt is always a good practice to keep on the good
side of Google. No need to be paranoid, but you
don’t want to do anything to bring unwanted attention
to your site, especially the kind of attention that
get your pages thrown into Google Supplemental Index
in the first place. Besides, you never know how long
it will take to get your pages back out and into
the main index where they truly belong. Rumor has it,
that place takes forever to freeze over!