Separating Supplemental Search Results In Google
According to Google, the practice of separating supplemental search results from the main index is intended to improve relevancy and search capability when searching. The index separation, in theory, does not affect major sites, but yields many more results than previously possible with obscure searches.
Google states that that the supplemental indices “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.”
This practice doesn’t appear to have been completely successful, at least in the minds of site owners who are finding what they believe to be important and relevant pages indexed among the supplemental search results. Once this happens, it is difficult to quickly resolve the issue. Making changes to your site and waiting or resubmitting to the Google’s main index can take many months. If my site for print spooler software has hundreds of content-rich, well-optimized pages that appear to be only in the supplemental index, there are a few things to look at. Of course, it’s to your benefit to address these issues before publishing your site. Consider these possibilities that may cause your pages to appear in the supplemental index:
1) Duplicate content. Google will choose the page they feel most relevant and display that URL in the main index when dealing with duplicate pages.
2) An excess of variables or parameters in your URL string. Keep your URLs short and sweet, with no more than 3 subdirectories.
3) Poor of absent inbound links. To Google, zero “quality” links means little value.
4) Inaccessibility or difficulty in finding pages due to poor internal linking. Make sure the spiders can easily find every page you want indexed. A simple text site map generally accomplishes this.
5) Resolve canonicalization issues. If you have a www… And a non-www… version of your site, one of them will almost certainly be indexed within the supplemental results. Use 301-redirects to let them know these pages are really same, if in fact they are. This also true with duplicate home pages (www.saranwrappedmonkey.com and www.saranwrappedmonkey.com/index.php).
When all else fails, try renaming your pages using a new URL and 301-redirect the old pages to the new. If nothing seems to work, try contacting the minds that know best at Google’s Webmaster Central. Suicide is always an option as well.
Article written by:
Rick Ferguson
Search Marketing Specialist
Fortune Interactive
Google states that that the supplemental indices “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.”
This practice doesn’t appear to have been completely successful, at least in the minds of site owners who are finding what they believe to be important and relevant pages indexed among the supplemental search results. Once this happens, it is difficult to quickly resolve the issue. Making changes to your site and waiting or resubmitting to the Google’s main index can take many months. If my site for print spooler software has hundreds of content-rich, well-optimized pages that appear to be only in the supplemental index, there are a few things to look at. Of course, it’s to your benefit to address these issues before publishing your site. Consider these possibilities that may cause your pages to appear in the supplemental index:
1) Duplicate content. Google will choose the page they feel most relevant and display that URL in the main index when dealing with duplicate pages.
2) An excess of variables or parameters in your URL string. Keep your URLs short and sweet, with no more than 3 subdirectories.
3) Poor of absent inbound links. To Google, zero “quality” links means little value.
4) Inaccessibility or difficulty in finding pages due to poor internal linking. Make sure the spiders can easily find every page you want indexed. A simple text site map generally accomplishes this.
5) Resolve canonicalization issues. If you have a www… And a non-www… version of your site, one of them will almost certainly be indexed within the supplemental results. Use 301-redirects to let them know these pages are really same, if in fact they are. This also true with duplicate home pages (www.saranwrappedmonkey.com and www.saranwrappedmonkey.com/index.php).
When all else fails, try renaming your pages using a new URL and 301-redirect the old pages to the new. If nothing seems to work, try contacting the minds that know best at Google’s Webmaster Central. Suicide is always an option as well.
Article written by:
Rick Ferguson
Search Marketing Specialist
Fortune Interactive
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