JLH Design Blog

We’re going to play a fun little game like Photo Hunt. With two world-famous jet setting Googler Adam Lasnik photos.

I’ll give you a hint, in photo #1 Adam is holding onto a drink, in photo #2 he is holding the Google Phone.

There are 8 subtle differences, get ready to play!

Photo 1 (stolen from Danny Sullivan)

Photo 2 (stolen from somewhere I don’t remember)

It is often mentioned in SEO and webmaster discussions, “My site went supplemental” A great discourse took place right on this blog (read the comments) that of course didn’t get a lot of airplay, but had great discoveries.

I can’t take the credit as Halfdeck made the initial observation, but the conclusion is that just because a page is shown as supplemental while doing a site: command in Google doesn’t mean that it isn’t also in the regular index for real live searches.

Thus I’ve coined the term, Supplemental-only , to distinguish those pages that are only supplemental and not in the regular index at all.

The implications of this are not far reaching or even that important but should be considered when analysing a sites status. The site: command is not the only tool you should use to check the health of the sites indexing in Google you’ll have to do some more legwork.

The issue came up in a Digital Point forum discussion about whether or not links on supplemental pages were devalued, where I integrated the supplemental-only theory into the discussion using Matt Cutts site as an example. Quoting only my comments:

All right I’m going to throw a wrench into this whole discussion, pages can be both supplemental and not-supplemental.

Let’s use the Matt Cutts page given before as an example:

http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/seo-ad…ress-releases/

Here’s that page, shown as supplemental in position #903 of the site: command.

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:…start=900&sa=N

Modifying the site: command to “site:mattcutts.com press” we now see the same page in position #2, but not marked supplemental.

http://www.google.com/search?num=100…ss&btnG=Search

or even better a straight google search for “seo advice: clean house” where the pages shows up at #1 out of about 949,000 and not supplemental.

http://www.google.com/search?q=seo+a…006-27,GGGL:en

The conclusion is that by viewing your site: results and seeing supplemental you are not seeing the whole picture, as pages in the supplemental index can also be in the regular index. It has even been said that ALL pages in the regular index are in the supplemental index, however all pages in the supplemental index are not in the regular index.

If you investigate further you’ll see that the cache for both instances are the same.

In order to understand this you must consider what supplemental truly means to Google. It’s just a lower crawl priority assigned to a page. Instead of crawling it daily, or weekly, they’ll crawl it at the much slower pace of the supplemental index crawler. It would make sense that each and every page google considers valuable to be included in their search is assigned a supplemental crawl rate. Some Pages are then assigned a regular index crawl rate.

So the often cited phrase, “My site has gone supplemental” is not true, as the site was always supplemental, it just left the main index.

Long winded I know, but to sum up. Just because you do a site: command and see pages marked as supplemental doesn’t mean that they are only supplemental. You must do further research on that page by:

1. Checking the cache date. If it’s 3 months old, then its probably supplemental only.
2. Checking for natural search results. Search for terms that the page would probably rank for like a snippet of the page title I did above.
3. Refine the site: command to include a keyword that would likely reduce the amount of pages and include the page you are looking at.

All-in-all its a lot of work for no real gain in knowledge. The only real way to keep a page out of the supplemental-only (as I just renamed it) index is to get more links to it, which is something you should be working on anyway.

To address the original question. Links from supplemental pages are still links like any other link, however if it’s truly a supplemental-only page than of course its going to have less weight and be updated less frequently by the very definition of supplemental. But beware of deeming a page supplemental just by looking at the site: command as it doesn’t tell the whole story.

…whew!

I should also add this. It may appear that a link from a supplemental-only page is downgraded because of the nature of supplemental-only pages; they are crawled infrequently. So if you gain a link on supplemental-only page today, google may not crawl that page until June and therefore you won’t get any credit for it until then. So checking the cache date is more of a good indicator of the inherent value of the page than visible PageRank (woefully behind) or even if it has supplemental by it in a site: search.

I think it was Ben Franklin who once said:

The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results

In the Google Webmaster Help Group we’ve been pleading for quite a while for them to make changes, here are two most recent examples, though there are many much older.

Here

And Here

Well, I’m going to stop my insane behavior and we’ll wait and see if they do improve the groups atmosphere. I’m not going to completely abandon the group, I’ll still help pull some honest folks out of the dulldrums (mostly behind the scenes) and I’ll throw in a post or two but until I see a sign that its going to improve, I’m chagning my patterns.

My Biggest Gripes are:

1. No way to cull the immense amount of daily repeat questions such as, “why doesn’t link: work?”, “where did my PageRank go?”, “How can I remove a page from Google?”
2. No method to sticky or at least keep official googler answers in one organized spot.
3. No method to dispel completely wrong statement.
4. No full time moderation or even moderator comments, for heaven’s sake all lesser webmastering forums at least have some volunteer’s that have been bestowed the name of moderator to at least add some sort of credence to their definitive statements.
5. Official googler involvement is dwindling to unacceptable proportions when you consider the vast resources a company like Google has when compared to the other forums. You would think they could afford one full time person to moderate, answer the simple repetitive questions, and of course step in and answer the tough questions.
6. And finally no charter with any teeth in it. “Where did my site go?” , “Am I banned?”, or “How can I contact Google?” will never be answered officially and should not be allowed to clutter up the boards.

Many other much more valuable suggestions have been made by much more valuable long time posters who are equally unappreciated as the free customer service support mechanism, and I suggest you feel free to read them.

Meanwhile, me and a few well intentioned others will continue our progress at the Google Webmaster’s FAQ site, and as always look forward to continued contributions from others.

In other news, Matt Cutts finally broke the veil of secrecy and gave us all some timely information that we could use. Contrary to his speculation, though the A-list SEO bloggers** didn’t pick up on the trend, it was noticed by several people in the Webmaster Help Group.

**Now Aaron has been referred to as an A-list SEO Blogger

This is just strange, strange, strange…but funny, it even includes the words “Butt Munches” which means its gotta be good.

…not what I do.

Google made an announcement on their webmaster’s blog spawning a lot of speculation over the death of scraped content.

Notably from the post:

…These techniques are usually accomplished by abusing qlweb style catalogues or by scraping content from sources known for good, valid content, like Wikipedia or the Open Directory Project.

These methods violate Google’s webmaster guidelines. Purely scraped content, even from high quality sources, does not provide any added value to your users. It’s worthwhile to take the time to create original content that sets your site apart. This will keep your visitors coming back and will provide useful search results. …

I take exception to this post purely on the basis that in the second paragraph they seem to infer that wiki is a “high quality source”, just because a site ranks in the top 5 for just about every query in Google doesn’t mean its high quality. It does mean that they’ve successfully designed their site to get a ton of Google-Love but as many, many people have discussed, these wiki results are ruining Google’s quality.

I am however hoping that this is just a shot across the bow of webmasters, a warning that changes are coming. Hopefully they are going to be true to their word and start removing these RSS feed generated sites, wiki clones, affiliate sites, shopping comparison junk, etc.

I’ll believe it when I see some of the biggest offenders like Google Directory and Google News deindexed. Currently The Google Directory enjoys 783,000 indexed pages and Google news has 13,200 pages.

Other than slapping up a view of the pagerank and reducing the competition by removing links to the other search engines can you tell me the value that Google has added to these pages?

DMOZ Original

Google’s Scraped Version

Becoming a parent means that your own mortality is no longer your number one concern, it’s rather comforting.

In response to numerous threads like this most recent one we’ve started a group edited blog to help document and organize the information compiled in the Google Webmasters Help Group.

Regular contributers are encouraged to sign-up as an editor and be rewarded with a the knowledge that you are doing your part to make it a better web, and a small credit link to a site of your choosing.

Please visit the new site called Google Webmasters Help FAQ and contribute if you can or possibly learn a thing or two.

You’ve got to love google by the way, I noticed Googlebot already in the logs for the blog that is less than 12 hours old and has not external links as far as I know. Already we’re seeing referels and their blog search has picked up 8 pages.

I’ve written about this topic before, but have found an even easier way that after set up doesn’t take any effort at all.

1) First off, if you haven’t already, go .

2) Now go download and install SEO for Firefox.

Now when you do a search you can see right in your search results the amount of supplemental results each domain has. For further information just click on the supplemental link under each search result to see what pages are in the supplemental index. Also note that a tool bar page rank of four isn’t enough to keep even Matt Cutts pages out of the supplemental index.

The final numbers are in, the computers are done crunching the numbers, and they’ve all been certified by me I’ve compiled some statistics for the Google Webmaster Group’s Participation in February 2007.

The Summary

Considering there weren’t any major pagerank updates, algorithm pushes, or changes this month it was a good indication that the Google Webmaster Group is gaining popularity on its own merits. Total participation is again up when you compare the daily averages, since February only has 28 days. The Most Improved Googler of the month award has to go to Jonathon Simon as his numbers were 355% of last months. Adam Lasnik comes in a close second with participation numbers up to 145% of the previous month.

The Raw Numbers

Total Webmaster Group - 7927
Adam Lasnik - 61
Vanessa Fox - 13
Thu Tu - 9
Maile Ohye - 6
Google Employee - 0
Jonathan Simon - 39
Andrey Stroilov - 0
Total - 128
Posts that are from Googlers - 1.6%

The Historical Charts

Total Group Participation

Percentage Of Googler Participation

Participation by Employee

The Regulars

Having the Google Webmaster Group be an official group run and operated by Google does add credence to the information available there, however the other 98.4% of the posts come from non-googlers. Many of those are people seeking guidance, support, or information. As the Google resources are finite the functionality of the group requires plenty of non-googler answers as well. As a token of recognition and appreciation I offer the list of February 2007 top posters and links to their sites, if given, please as always patronize their sites.

1. Sebastian
2. dockarl: Matthew James
3. webado: Christina
4. Cass-hacks’ Web2.0 Thumbnails
5. Cristina
6. softplus: John
7. JLH: John
8. Phil Payne
9. Rick1
10. Admin Aaron: Aaron