The end of the supplemental index?
December 20, 2007
For those of you not familiar with the Google supplemental index, I found the best ever summary of this indice (In´dice – n. 1. Index) at Tropical SEO to sum up what this is. Quote: “The Google Supplemental index is the Siberian work camp for web pages.” I find that statement hilarious and I laughed out loud.
In the past, if you’re website had pages that Google didn’t trust or had a lot of inlinks that were suspect, Google would place your pages in a huge, dark, dusty database where you would technically be “indexed” and could “possibly” show in the search results, but the chances were slim. The official Google statement on this subject was that they would search this index if and when they had to fulfill a harder or more esoteric (obscure) search query.
I actually had an entire site removed from the index and place in the supplimental index because I had one link to a forum on the site that we thought was removed. This forum had turned into a haven for sex and spam and when Google followed the obscure link on the site it looked like we were operating a shady site! The site has still never recovered from this error.
If you have pages that do not show up in the search results it’s a good chance that you were placed in web page Siberia. Chances are you’re pages don’t have good, descriptive title tags, meta description tags, trusted links to your content or good, useful content in the first place so they’re not worth ranking anyway.
In addition to the need to always serve high quality search results, Google has eluded that the technical hurdle required to search every available web page was a daunting undertaking.
It appears that they have been working to eliminate the supplemental index in recent months by increasing the crawl frequency, and removing the supplemental result tag that was applied to web pages in the first place. To put a final nail in the coffin they’ve just announced that they’ll be searching the supplemental index all the time and provided us with the following tidbits about new search results:
- When doing a search, Google will now search every page, every time. This has required (as Google says) “truly amazing technical feats“.
- Searches will return a much deeper slice of the web and more relevant results
- You’ll see more results for non-English queries
- Less visible pages that were indexed will show more often now
I can’t tell from the official announcement post if they’ve completely eliminated the supplemental index and lumped everything together or if it still exists in some way. What I would guess is that Google still suppresses pages that are suspect and not trusted. I think it only makes sense for obvious reasons. The announcement does not confirm this but I highly doubt this announcement will benefit any shady websites or websites that simply provide lousy content. What’s good is that websites that are just starting out have a better chance of being found and eventually improving their ranking if they’re truly useful. It’s also good for people doing deep research on a subject. I know that I’ve ran out of relevant results at times so this may be a welcome change.
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