Google’s Four-Year Supplemental Results Experiment is Over
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Loading ...Google’s four-year experiment with their supplemental index is now over. Google first removed the supplemental tag from their index in July making is harder for webmasters to tell which pages they had in the supplemental index compared to pages in Google’s main index. Now Google has removed the supplemental index completely and in a move that should make webmasters happy, have returned the supplemental results back to the main search results index.
It’s to early to tell what effect if any this will have on webmasters. Please share your predictions below.
Google supplemental results were first introduced in 2003, much to the dismay of webmasters around the world who want as many pages indexed as possible for search. Pages in supplemental results could still be found but only for obscure queries causing webmasters to label the Google’s supplemental results as “supplemental hell.” For the past four years this index was known as where Google put their trash. The web pages placed in the supplemental index weren’t penalized as Google had stated, but were placed their because of duplicate content, low pagerank and not enough quality incoming links. Once placed in supplemental hell the web site search traffic would suffer and the pages wouldn’t get crawled as often.
In July, when Google removed the “supplemental results” label, you knew Google was overhauling their system to provide cleaner and deeper indexing with fewer restrictions. Yonatan Zunger of Google’s Search Quantity Team last week, said, “Rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query. From a user perspective, this means that you’ll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.”
That should be good news for webmasters even though it’s four years past due. All it really means is Google use both indexes for queries rather than only using the supplemental results for obscure queries. All in all I wouldn’t expect to see much of an increase in traffic. After all, pages were in the supplemental index for a reason and until them problems are fixed they won’t rank well anyway.
