34,499,998 pages went supplemental!
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.
