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Google's Supplemental Index - What You Need To Know
By Titus Hoskins (c) 2007

If you run an online website or business you have probably
already 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 one 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
(http://www.forbes.com/home/technology/2007/04/29/
sanar-google-skyfacet-tech-cx_ag_0430googhell.html) "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 file. 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 *** -sjpked

replacing '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 Ratio

You 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.com

 This 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 Index

It 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!
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The author is a full-time online marketer who has numerous
websites. For the most effective web marketing tools try:
Internet Marketing Tools (http://www.marketingtoolguide.com).
For the latest Google Marketing Strategies go here: Google
Cash File (http://www.bizwaremagic.com/Google_Cash_File.htm)
Copyright © 2007 Titus Hoskins. This article may be freely
distributed if this resource box stays attached.
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