JLH Design

Since Adam posted that more Googlers soon to be ignoring the Google Webmaster Help Group where should us regulars send people for answers from Google?

Is it seoroundtable blog comments, webmasterworld where they strain to figure out what sites people are talking about, maybe Matt Cutts blog where the real estate industry goes to complain about fraudulent link exchanges, or do we have to fork over ass-loads of money to sit in on secret sessions?

Now that threadwatch is dying it may be time for someone to start a googlerwatch site, as we cannot count on them bothering with the official channels any more. We tried to set up a not-for-profit site chronicling what Googlers were saying in the Official Help Group, but they stopped talking, and the heck if I’m going to funnel visitors to ad filled A-list blogs.

I’ve been quoting an excellent post by Susan Moskwa (Go Wisconsin!) on Google Webmaster Central lately, and thought I’d dissect it a bit. First thing I’d like to highlight is that when you’ve been caught spamming they probably take a deeper look at the site, how it ranks, and particularly how it got there.

But we must also take into account that besides the shady SEO techniques used on a particular site (for instance hidden text, redirecting doorway pages, etc) there are often off-site SEO techniques used such as creating artificial link popularity in order to gain a high position in Google’s SERPs

Secondly, after the spammy on-the-page factors are removed and the link profile is updated they then re-rank the site once it re-included.

…once those manipulations to make a site rank unnaturally high are removed, the site gains the position it merits based on its content and its natural link popularity…

The reason I want to highlight this is that it’s a subject I see a lot from webmasters. They’ve been caught spamming, clean up the site, and then can’t seem to figure out why they don’t rank where they used to anymore. Susan, in a rare glimpse at Google being quite open, lays the groundwork for understanding this. As she explains, the reason some sites are penalized for spamming, is because spamming works. By removing sites Google has really always admitted this simple fact, but at least now it’s in writing.

Site removal is also basically an admission that detection is not nearly as automatic as we’d like to believe. If the algorithm could easily detect spamming techniques the logical conclusion would be they’d just ignore them, and let the site rank where it would without the technique. The same way they treat the keyword meta tag, an abused system of assigning sites keywords used in the early 1930s, ignored by any real search engine today, but religiously used by the flat-earth-society of webmasters. I’d imagine there are too many instances of collateral damage for many types of automatic detection, for example CSS driven menu systems that hide some text.

Spamming a search engine takes some sort of sophistication that your average joe-six-pack mom-n-pop shop doesn’t normally exhibit, which is why I am glad to see Susan mention that they look deeper into how the site has been acting off the page as well. The logic is that if you’ve been sly enough to hide some text, cloak, or any other various egregious violations maybe your links should be looked at. The first and easiest place for the company that has built an empire on data mining is to look at your links. They’ve got cache data from your site going back to Jamestown in the 17th century, and data on the rest of the web. Looking for exchanged links is nothing for a bit of data mining to find, going 3 or 4 levels deep for linking rings is probably just as easy. Now they simply make a note of all those links to your site not counting.

I think this is also a good indication of the manual nature of penalization as I think we are talking about link exchanges, or attempts to manipulate search engine rankings artificially. It’s not the same as reciprocal linking. Reciprocal linking is a natural phenomena of the web, birds of a feather tend to flock together as they say. For example I’ve linked to search giants like Sebastian and Matt Cutts multiple times, and both have linked to me. That was not an arranged for any ranking purposes, but rather as a consequence of the subjects covered, thus a reciprocal link in that case is a good thing. Those links back and forth probably do count for something. Only a manual review and detect the difference.

So what’s all this mean? If you’ve been caught spamming, expect Google to put on the rubber gloves and give your site a real good look-see. Also expect that even though you have removed your spamming ways your ranking will probably be effected because 1) the original spam worked and doesn’t now, and 2) other factors, even off site ones, will also be re-evaluated.

I think where this really impacts people is the ones that get busted for unnatural linking procedures. If you’re running a site in a specific niche that has garnered most of it’s authority from unnatural linking between sites through exchanges and Google busts up that linking ring, some people are not going to be happy. If your site’s links were comprised of mainly industry wide exchanges expect a big drop, on the other hand if your competition had a good amount of real links, expect them to weather the storm better than you. No amount of reconsideration requests is going to get your site back to where it was and there is nothing any Googler can do to help as the old links that helped are now gone.

The answer, as always with Google, is to obey the rules and get more links. Real ones.

Sponsor: Today’s post was brought to you by Jane’s Addiction, circa 1990, back in my college days.

I’ve been caught stealing
Once when I was 5
I enjoy stealing
It’s just as simple as that
Well, it’s just a simple fact
When I want something, I don’t want to pay for it
I walk right through the door
Walk right through the door
Hey all right!
If I get by, it’s mine
Mine all mine!
My girl, she’s one too
She’ll go and get her a shirt
Stick it under her skirt
She grabbed a razor for me
And she did it just like that
When she wants something, she don’t want to pay for it
She walk right through the door
Walk right through the door
Hey all right!
If I get by, it’s mine
Mine all mine!
We sat around the pile
We sat and laughed
We sat and laughed and waved it into the air!
And we did it just like that
When we want something, we don’t want to pay for it
We walk right through the door
Walk right through the door
Hey, all right!
If I get by, it’s mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine, mine. . .

Lee Odden added this blog to his Big List of Search Marketing Blogs. I probably made it because he knows I was suffering with him through Minnesota’s other season, Road Construction. Thanks Lee.

Coming up next: Matt Cutts adds me to his blogroll.

As promised Baghdad Bob is now live and ready for your submissions. He doesn’t need to be a world famous liar, just someone that you have proof of his/her lying ways. By using the service you can get yourself a free link and a permalink to always be able to refute your favorite liar.

I don’t normally do any actual content writing tips here, like most I like to keep my secrets to myself But while going over search engine referrals this morning I thought of something I’d like to share, just because it’s so basic and simple but effective.

There is an astonishing amount of people that ask search engines questions, literally. I’m not sure if it’s from the bygone days of the Ask Jeeves campaign or that people actually think Google answers questions but they do. They will form their query not as a keyword search but as a formal question.

For this reason I often include forms of a questions typically asked when writing a page that answers said question. If you’ve read my blog before you’ll recognize my tendency to do this. It’s not just another example of my poor writing skills but rather me looking for some long-tail search results.

For example one that comes up often is, “Why don’t I have a page rank in Google?”, which when queried in Google leads to the page I linked to as the number #1 result.

This applies to other types of sites as well. We spend all our time trying to rank for the holy grail one word term like “Widgets” or the more specific “Red Widgets” . You’d be surprised how many real people search using full questions with an action word in them for example; “How can I buy red widgets online?” or “What is the price of red widgets?”. These semantic phrases are much easier to rank for than the one or two keyword phrases.

I’m not sure if this is purely a symptom of people personifying the machine or it’s the searchers attempt to dig down in the results. Often if you search for “red widgets” you’ll get the manufacturer, an expired ebay auction, some ebay subdomain, a wiki page on red widgets, some review site with Amazon affiliate links, subdomain spam on 31sui38s.com, and then some real sites. The searcher isn’t looking for ebay or Amazon links, they’ve probably already tried those, wiki gives them information, the manufacturer gives them information, etc. so they narrow it down with action words like, “buy”, “price”, “order”, “purchase” and questions like, “Where”, “How”, or “Who”.

While writing your articles and websites, think not only about including all the information that you as an expert searcher would use to find the page, but also someone who isn’t as well trained. It’s important to include in the text the intent and purpose of the page as well as the content.

Tips

• If you’re site is trying to sell red widgets be sure to include in the red widget sales page that they can “buy” or “order” there and the “price” of the “purchase”. In sales you always have to remember to ask for the order, the same is true on the internet.
• If you are writing an informative article, try to include the common or multiple common questions the article will answer prominently along with the answer.
• Dump the “buy it now” or “add to cart” buttons and replace with text links, or at least include ALT text.
• Personalize the page rather than generalize it. A million sites may be trying to rank for “Make money online” but much less are thinking of the average searcher who is looking for “How can I make money online?” (then sell them their ebook telling them to sell an ebook)
• Everyone is looking for a bargain. Including bargain hunting words like “Sale”, “bargain”, “discount”, and “clearance” . Those are words that ebay, wiki, and the manufacturer won’t have on their red widget page, but you should.
• Smart internet shoppers are also coupon clippers so give them coupons, be sure to offer “promotional codes” or “coupons” on the sales page in addition to the cart.
• Don’t feel like you have to trap your users by camouflaging a sales page as information. Information is easy to find and you don’t want them people anyway, you want people who are ready to buy, trumpet that fact. The page should be as much about red widgets as it is about the purpose of the page, to sell red widgets.
• If you’ve wrote the definative information page on a subject be sure to include all of the questions it attempts to answer, in a form they will be asked.
• Write the way people speak. In grammar school you were chastised for not writing in formal language which is very true if you are writing a book, but in the reality that is the internet, most of the searchers aren’t writers and most will search the way they talk.

The question “Why doesn’t Google show all my links?” gets asked all the time in forums. Generally the poster is really asking, “What do I need to do to make Google recognize my links?”, somehow inferring that they have a problem because Google doesn’t show their links.

2nd thing first

The answer to the second question is that they don’t show your links because they don’t show your links by design, its not an indication that anything is wrong with your site. For example the link operator show I have 85 links to this blog, whereas Webmaster Tools reports over 2000.

First off let’s take a look at their on-line documentation, for the definition of the link operator they say:

The query [link:] will list webpages that have links to the specified webpage. For instance, [link:www.google.com] will list webpages that have links pointing to the Google homepage. Note there can be no space between the “link:” and the web page url.

This functionality is also accessible from the Advanced Search page, under Page Specific Search > Links.

This is where most of the confusion begins. Being that we trust Google to be the #1 search engine that it is, when they tell us “will list webpages that have links” we believe them. Unfortunately the reality is that it “will list [SOME] webpages that have links.” Which is further explained in this official blog post, where they say:

You asked, and we listened: We’ve extended our support for querying links to your site to much beyond the link: operator you might have used in the past. Now you can use webmaster tools to view a much larger sample of links to pages on your site that we found on the web. Unlike the link: operator, this data is much more comprehensive and can be classified, filtered, and downloaded. All you need to do is verify site ownership to see this information.

As I indicated above using a verified account in Webmaster Tools will give you a lot more information, but there is a caveate. Not all of those links will count for anything. They don’t show every link out there, and the ones they do may be nofollowed, as explained by Matt Cutts:

Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. I’m going to say that again: Do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight. Sometime in the next year, someone will say “But I saw an insert-link-fad-here backlink show up in Google’s backlink tool, so it must count. Right?” And then I’ll point them back here, where I say do not assume just because you see a backlink that it’s carrying weight.

First thing 2nd

To answer the first question, “Why doesn’t Google show all my links?,” let’s imagine if they did perfectly with each and every page that links to you.  Further imagine that they only show the relative links that carry weight, and even better they rank them in order of importance.

Imagine that you’re the owner of www.sockpuppets.com and you want to check your backlinks.  You go to [fictitious] Google and type in link:sockpuppets.com and it shows you 2875 sites that link to you.  You’ve got all the information on which sites linked to you, and what sites obviously don’t that you think should.

While perusing the internet for a gift for his niece a less than scrupulous  web designer finds your site, he likes it so much he thinks he’ll copy it as imitation is the sincerest form of flattery.  First he downloads your site and all of the contents, replacing the items you sell with affiliate links to other sites.  Then he heads over to godaddy.com and buys sockpuppets.info for $1.99 and uploads the copy of your site to his fresh new domain.

After that is done he heads over to [fictitious] Google an types in link:sockpuppets.com and gets the complete list of sites that link to yours, imports those sites into a database, and loads up his favorite mass mailing script, and sends off a letter to 2875 sites that goes something like this:

 Dear Webmaster of {sitename},

We thank you for your past support of www.sockpuppets.com through a link to our site.  We never rest at sockpuppets and are always striving to improve our and thus your user’s experience.  As part of our continued development we have recently launched our new and improved site on the newer top level domain www.sockpuppets.info.

During this transition the older version at sockpuppets.com will still be available, but that will be phased out next quarter.

We hope we can continue to count on your support and ask that you take a brief moment to update your link to our new domain of www.sockpuppets.info.

If you have any questions at all please feel free to send me an email.

Thank you very much,

John Smith
Webmaster
Webmaster@sockpuppet.info

Sure not all sites will respond but a good percentage will.  In Google’s view those long standing links that you’ve worked so hard to build and maintain have just changed their vote from your site to this new hot site on the Internet.  It won’t be long before the copied site is outranking your own site.

Now this little fictional story may be over simplified but the lesson is true.  The reason Google doesn’t show the links to your site is that others could use that information to hurt you.  By requiring you to verify ownership of the site, or at least control of it, they are assuring that only the right people can get this information.

I need a new forum to hang my hat in. I’ve enjoyed the Google Webmaster Help Group for quite a while now, but it’s loosing its focus. The place has been inundated with retards trolls, and left for dead by Google*. No longer is it the wonderful place it once was that had insightful official information. That official information is now pretty much exclusively fed through non-official A-list SEO bloggers now or at their conferences around the bar.

I really enjoy the search engine standards discussion the most, so I’m trying to find a new active forum. I figure if Google isn’t going to be answering any more question officially I might as well make my contributions somewhere where some who needs the money is gaining from it. I get the feeling that Google is busy counting their money and not looking to improve their webmaster relations or be bothered with supporting us little people.

I’ve tried Digital Point and WebmasterWorld. WMW has a higher quality of posters, but you can’t discuss real world issues there so their search engine forums are worthless. Digital point will allow spirited discussion, but there are WAY too many idiotic questions that the intelligent stuff get’s hard to find. Been lurking about cre8asiteforums but the volume is so low its hard to get a discussion going, maybe after I get to know some of the players it will improve.

Any other suggestions? If you’ve got a favorite please post a comment so they at least get a link, and perhaps a new contributer (me). I love helping people and learning, not arguing and reading lies, so moderation is a must.

* I was putting together my final statistics of the group, but I got depressed and sad, so I scrapped it. Not only is Googler participation nil, but the once strong regulars are backing away. It’s hard not to when hourly the same trolls spew their lies unattested.

Not wanting to get on the wrong side of Google’s paid links policy, I am declaring that any link you see on this site that is BLUE and DOUBLE UNDERLINED is an affiliate link from Amazon automatically and dynamically generated.

I have no way of nofollowing them, as the script is external to my site. I’d imagine that with a company the size of Amazon someone has talked to Google in those super-secret behind closed doors meeting and it will be all right. It’s not like I couldn’t live without the $100 a month I get from Amazon affiliate links, but I don’t want to test the bannation waters just yet.

So you, the reader, have been informed.

The famous Google Reinclusion request has been renamed Reconsideration Request perhaps to more accurately describe it’s purpose, which is no longer just for reincludding a site.

Adam Lasnik has said,

It’s a trust thing. We don’t accept completely anonymous reinclusion requests; everyone who submits a request does so now through our Webmaster Tools (when they’re logged in). Basically, there’s no harm in filling one out if you feel your site’s presence or ranking in
Google has been adjusted due to guideline violations… but, obviously, we probably wouldn’t be terribly amused or apt-to-re-include if we received such requests with annoying frequency (e.g., daily requests for 174 of your different sites). Common sense applies, and — thankfully — has reigned supreme in the area of reinclusion requests so far

Regards,
Adam

This name sounded familiar, and it was, because it was something I said on November 29, 2006.

For now I just suggest everyone link to www.reconsiderationrequest.com with the anchor text Reconsideration Request.

Your site is judged not only on the content it provides, the sites that link to you, but also the sites you link to. The subject of those links help set the theme of your site but also define your web neighborhood, which in most cases you want to keep good.

We’ve been told in the Webmaster Guidelines to avoid bad neighborhoods.

In particular, avoid links to web spammers or “bad neighborhoods” on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links

If you must link to such a terrible place, then by all means use the comment-spam-paid-link-announcing-bad-neighborhood-no-page-rank-passing nofollow attribute in the links.

In the old days before electricity Google used to announce to the world that a site sucked by gray barring the visible PageRank or simply delisiting the entire site.

When judging a site you used to be able to visit it and check out it’s visible PageRank run a site command and see that it’s indexed and be pretty well assured that the site was doing fine. With the emergence of penalties instead of bans, PageRank not changing, and gray bars showing up for all kinds of pages the job of being a good linker has become more difficult.

With that said, I’ve come up with a short quick list of things that can be done to check if the site is still in good graces with Google. Some of these items are based on pure conjecture by forum members ( the infamous -30 and -950 debaters) so any one failure should not be a clear indication of the sites linkability but may be cause for more investigation.

1. Check for PageRank, if the site is new this may not exist.
2. Check number of pages indexed using the site command.
   1. Compare this number to the URLs in their sitemap if possible.
   2. Crawl the site with Gsitecrawler (which used to have sitelinks but doesn’t now???) to see how many URLs they actually have, compare with indexed.
3. Check the supplemental count. Is it in-line with what you’d expect for the main pages visible PageRank. A PageRank 6 site should be able to hold more than 3 pages in the real index!.
4. Search for the domain name, see if they turn up as the first result.
5. Does the home page show up first in the site command?
6. Most importantly, and often overlooked, if you are linking to site because they are the authority on chickens, search for chickens. Where do they fall in the results?
7. Building on #6 check the ranking for the keywords and combinations of keywords that the site is obviously targeting.
8. Not all bad sites have been caught, yet, so do a good check for compliance with the Webmaster Guidelines. While the site may pass the sniff test on all other fronts, if its got hidden links and text on it, it may be banned tomorrow and you don’t want to be linking to it.
9. Check their link profile using Site Explorer. If 90% of their links are from directories, irrelevant sites, or forum signatures you know you’ve got something suspicious going on.
10. Check the sites basic maintenance quality. A site that has a good robots.txt file, no conical issues, doesn’t use session IDs, etc is probably more aware of search engine standards than one that doesn’t.
11. Check the META tags. Not that this is a sign of being banned, but for me a sign of quality. If the site has 23 META tags from 100 “keywords” to “google-pray” and “revisit-after” you know you are dealing with an amateur that may walk into trouble in the future.
12. Send Matt Cutts an email and ask him to check the site out. He usually get’s back to me in a day or two. Here’s his email address setup just for site health inquiries, in case you don’t have it already:

I’d be interested in hearing what you use to judge a linking partner. If you’ve got a list published include it in the comments, all approved comments go non-nofollowed in 2 weeks!

Updates

JohnMu says, “My main tool for evaluating the value of a site before I link to it is the MSN linkfromdomain:-query. There’s nothing better — even if MSN only has 1/100th of the data that Google (or even Yahoo) has. It would be great to be able to check up on sites like that, eg: [linkfromdomain:othersite.com xxx] or better: [linkfromdomain:othersite.com seo]“

Who will be our next Minister of Disinformation?

You?

Twitter, the social cross between IM’s and blogging, is so buggy and frequently screwed up that I’ve started to use it as a euphemism for one of the English language’s most versatile words. Therefor, I offer this as a guide. (how’s that for branding?)

In language, “twitter” falls into many grammatical categories.

• Twitter can be used as a verb both transitive (he twittered her) and intransitive (she was twittered by him).
• a active verb (he really gives a twitter),
• a passive verb (she really doesn’t give a twitter),
• an adverb (she is twittering interested in him) and
• a noun (she is a fine twitter).
• an adjective (she is twittering beautiful).

As you can see there is a whole lot of real versatility with “twitter”. It pops up everywhere. Besides its sexual connotation, this lovely word can be used to describe many situations:

• GREETING - How the twitter are you?
• FRAUD - I got twittered by that crook;
• DISMAY - Oh, twitter it!;
• TROUBLE - I’m twittered now!;
• CONFUSION - What the twitter?!;
• AGGRESSION - “Twitter you!”;
• DISGUST - “Twitter me”
• DESPAIR - Twittered again!;
• PHILOSOPHY - “Who gives a twitter?”
• INCOMPETENCE - “He’s a real twitter-off”;
• DISPLEASURE - “What the twitter is going on here?”
• NUMEROLOGY - “Sixty-twitterin’-nine”;
• LOST - “Where the twitter are we?”
• DISBELIEF - “Untwitteringbelievable
• RETALIATION - Up your twittering a$$!”
• REBELLION - Twitter it!;
• DISPLEASURE - What the twitter’s going on?;
• SATISFACTION - twitter me again!

Also as:

• DESCRIPTIVE ANATOMY - “He’s a twitterin’ a$$hole!”
• TO TELL TIME - “It’s six-twittering-thirty.”
• PREDICTION - “Well, I’ll be twittered!”
• A POLITICAL STATEMENT - “Twitter Washington”
• INCESTUOUS - “Mothertwitterer”
• A PUT DOWN - “Twitter off, buster!”
• ALL ENCOMPASSING - “Twitter ‘em all!”
• GOVERNMENTAL AFFAIRS - “Twitter the IRS”
• A POKER HAND- “A royal twitter”
• TO START A RELATIONSHIP - “Let’s twitter now!”
• AS AN ACCEPTANCE - “Twitterin’ eh!”
• ENJOYMENT - “Twitterin’ Wow!” ”
• A CLOSING - “Twitteringly yours”.
• MATERNAL - “Mothertwitterer”

Google still says that there is almost nothing a competitor can do to harm your ranking or have your site removed from their index. What about a site that is not your competitor, but one that you thought was your partner?.

I’ll be using the poorly titled newest addition to the webmaster guidelines ” Why should I report paid links ” as a reference.

The first thing you read about your site being negatively impacted is where they clearly state that buying links is a violation of the webmaster guidelines and can result in penalties.

Buying links in order to improve a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results

Now this raises an interesting consideration. Assuming Google isn’t in your bank account, they don’t have access to your credit card statements, and they don’t review your tax returns the only way they could divine that you’ve actually purchased a link is to make the conclusion that a site that links to yours has sold that link. Previously we were told that those sites would loose their ability to pass PageRank, but the quoted paragraph above points to a much more proactive penalization of the linkee not the linker.

Further down the page they expound a bit on what Google considers to be the correct way to buy links for traffic purposes only.

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

The interaction of the two paragraphs cited represent a profound change in Google’s earlier stated stance that external sites can’t hurt you (almost).

They have now clearly stated that buying links can harm your site, but if you do buy links that they should be constructed in a way that does not pass PageRank, such as with nofollow or through a redirect. Unfortunately for you, the link buyer, you have no control of how the webmaster you purchased your link from set’s up her website.

Imagine a situation where you’ve done your due diligence an purchased a link for traffic from a site that nofollows all of it’s sold links. Three month’s go by and they decide to change their policy and remove all of the nofollows. Your busy running your own website and don’t have time to police the internet full time and don’t notice that your purchased link is now not not-nofollowed. Google may have already tagged the linking site as a link seller [perhaps due to abundance of nofollow!] and now sees your link that is not properly designated as a paid link and issues a penalty on your site.

We can’t have it both ways, either external sites can or cannot hurt you, or link buying can or cannot hurt you, the two are not independent of each other.

I can forsee a sub-economy building out of this if it truly is the case; purchasing obviously paid links for your competitor on sites that don’t properly designate them as paid. On your site that sells links offer a free one time link to a non-indexed domain. You can prove to your new potential client that your site is deemed a link seller as the new purchased link should not get the new domain indexed. After that charge a set rate to link to your clients competitor, without using nofollow, through javascript, or through a redirect. To expand your business even further you could also add the option of letting the targeted site outbid the competitor to take the link down!

I’m hoping that this is just a case of sabre rattling by Google and the new paid links page has not been thought thoroughly through. As it is written now it’s a complete policy shift from the stance that the link seller will have their ability to pass PageRank stripped. A simple change of the subject in the two paragraphs above from the link buyer to the link seller would also solve this paradox, such as:

Buying Selling links in order to improve manipulate a site’s ranking is in violation of Google’s webmaster guidelines and can negatively impact a site’s ranking in search results

and:

Not all paid links violate our guidelines. Buying and selling links is a normal part of the economy of the web when done for advertising purposes, and not for manipulation of search results. Links purchased sold for advertising should be designated as such. This can be done in several ways, such as:

* Adding a rel=”nofollow” attribute to the href tag
* Redirecting the links to an intermediate page that is blocked from search engines with a robots.txt file

More discrepancies in the new webmaster guidelines to come soon…

Andy Beal posted a nice 1 minute answer from Matt Cutts regarding the supplemental index.

There’s no news in the first 35 seconds or so, just a recap of what we already know.

1) Get more links to pages to get them out of the Supplemental Index
2) A site with a given PageRank can only hold so many pages in the real index, get more links, get more PageRank, get more pages in the regular index.
3) The abligitory supplemental is not a penalty.

The video was taken with a 3 year old cell phone, and it cuts in an out, but if you slide the slider till its just under the “M” in Marketing Pilgrim Tv, you may hear something new.

Matt says:

We parse pages and index pages differently when they are in the supplemental index.

He then goes on to explain that the way the supplemental page is stored in the database is different, they have basically a compressed summary that may not contain all the words and phrase relationships stored. So they will not show up in the search results as a normal page would because its not even accessible in their infrastructure the same way.

So while being Supplemental may not be a penalty, it sure doesn’t mean the site isn’t suffering from something. As with anything with Google, get more links, and every thing will be all right.

Update 6/7/07 - Halfdeck posts his analysis of the film clip, it’s worth the read on hiss explanation of Supplemental Results.

When reading or answering questions in Google webmaster forums one of the most often heard statements is “MY SITE JUST WENT SUPPLEMENTAL” with a cry for help.

I’ve written before that checking your site using the site: command in Google is not an accurate way of testing what pages are in the supplemental index and which are not.

Here is a prime example of why that is not true. Perform a site:blogspot.com search in Google. You’ll get Results 1 - 10 of about 34,500,000 from blogspot.com. (0.08 seconds) [or something pretty close]

The first two results are in the regular index, and then from that point on the rest of the results on the first page are marked supplemental.

It’s almost impossible to believe that Google has sent all but two of it’s own blogger pages into the supplemental index, specially considering they operate their own official blogs(*) on the domain.

Once again, doing a site search for your site is NOT an accurate way to find your supplemental pages. It’s more of a symptom of the site: command being broken than a reflection on the site.

(*) When visiting the Webmaster Central blog it appeared pink! Which means all of the links are nofollowed. Upon further review I can see why now. In the source code they have:

<meta name="ROBOTS" content="NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW" />

Is this an error, a mistake, or on purpose? It’s since June 1, 2007 because the site was successfully cached on that date.