28th March 2007

Introducing a new SEO term: Supplemental-Only

posted in Google, Webmastering |

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.

If you liked this post please buy me a beer. Thanks.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 28th, 2007 at 12:33 pm and is filed under Google, Webmastering. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. All comments are subject to my NoFollow policy. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

There are currently 7 responses to “Introducing a new SEO term: Supplemental-Only”

Why not let me know what you think by adding your own comment! All the cool kids are doing it.

  1. 1 MyAvatars 0.2 On March 29th, 2007, Patrick Berry said:

    Hi,

    I actually started that thread over at DP, its good to see your still hunting for the truth on this…

    I have to say, I greatly appreciated your insights. Thanks.

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 1st, 2007, Matt James said:

    Hi JLH - I don’t know whether this adds to the discussion at all, but I noticed this behaviour ages back, and I don’t think it’s something all that new - Google has said before that just because a page is supplemental doesn’t mean that it won’t appear in the results for searches.

    In my (limited) experience, it seems that you can have a brand new site, with the majority of pages in supps, and still turn up number one in the SERPS if your supp page has fairly niche, uncompetitive content :)

    Cheers,

    M

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 1st, 2007, Craig said:

    Just because someone has shiny toys does not mean they are of much use.

    A page can be supplemental and still show up in top positions in search results for key terms. A page can be in the regular index and show up on page 999. A page can have no inbound links, i.e. no PageRank and be in the normal index.

    Bottom line, where does a given page show up in search results for desired key terms and phrases.

    Everything else would seem to be more on the order of a major distraction and, unfortunately causing people to end up spending more time chasing ghosts, fairies and sprites when what they should be doing is spending more time on improving the quality of their content.

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 2nd, 2007, Sebastian said:

    Applying simplified conclusions to a complex SEO question reveal 20% of the truth whilst 80% are just not worth discussing because the efforts necessary to analyze one more percent equal the 20% analysis. The alternative is working with 20% reasonable conclusions plus 80% common sense.

  5. 5 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 2nd, 2007, JLH said:
    I’m not sure what side of this you are all falling on this, I’m as confused as ever.
  6. 6 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 2nd, 2007, Sebastian said:

    I think you’ve figured out everything you’ll need for work. The supp index is just what it appears to be, a second source for the query engine. Not a grave and not a penalty.
    As you said PR is not everything, I’ve pages with nice PR but ugly URLs in the supp-only index, and well ranking pages carrying 90%+ duplicated content as well ;) Sometimes these pages trigger well converting search queries because they provide more content on a particular topic than the sources.

  7. 7 MyAvatars 0.2 On April 5th, 2007, JLH said:
    Ahhh, CRAP, now I did it, I didn’t take screen shots of the searches I ran for the comments, and now this post ranks for some of the search terms….argh…oh well you’ll just have to take my word on it, it really was there!

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