6th June 2007

Supplemental Pages: Again

posted in Google |

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.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 6th, 2007 at 12:13 am and is filed under Google. 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 4 responses to “Supplemental Pages: Again”

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 June 6th, 2007, JohnMu said:

    I was wondering who would catch that first - congrats!

    Parsing pages differently could mean a lot of interesting things. Maybe it was even said on accident, hmmm :-). Or maybe we’re just reading too much into Matt’s words :-)

  2. 2 MyAvatars 0.2 On June 6th, 2007, JLH said:
    I’ve been fixated on them saving crawling resources with the lower crawl rate of the supplemental results, but seemed to forget about their limited processing resources as well. This logically fits in. As the web grows larger and larger Google’s index continues to grow, and they have to prioritize their resources: Crawlers, data storage, and processing time. Supplemental are less important pages, as judged by links of course, and perhaps even by the subject matter? Hmmm, it would make sense to prioritize for the most popular 1,000,000 (random number) queries and their top 1000 results, and then let the others fall to the supplemental crap pile.

    After all, people would not be too happy if that little timer at the top of the search page said Results 1 - 10 of about 485,480,000,000 for ___. (8.19 minutes)

    Before we had people worrying about supplemental we had everyone complaining they couldn’t get the site indexed. At least now they index it pretty fast, but it probably won’t rank for anything, since it will be mostly supplemental.

    I see this as a possible chink in the armor that is the Google monopoly. It was techno-web-geeks that deemed Google the best search engine a long time ago. As new sites get indexed fast, but dumped in the supplemental results which send them 3 visitors a year, the other search engines (and I use that term loosely) if they were smart would jump on that and prioritize freshness. The webmaster’s would see most of their traffic is coming from Yahoo and MSN [forget Ask until they get at least 2 more modems and crawl more than once every 2 years] and start pushing them as the real deal.

    The first search engine that doesn’t return the same old wiki, ebay, amazon, about, or answers.com for every query but digs deeper may be the next Google.

    Millions of links to a page means a page is more popular, which also means almost everybody knows about it, otherwise they wouldn’t be SEARCHING. The real diamonds are buried away in a compressed database that’s running on an Atari 400 labeled supplemental somewhere in Googleland.

  3. 3 MyAvatars 0.2 On June 6th, 2007, dockarl said:

    That’s a great catch JLH - very interesting.

    When you think about it, the mind boggles about just how complex their calculations must be - I’d assume the aggregate processing power required to index pages would increase exponentially (or probably more likely as a power relationship) vs number of pages in existence. Moore’s law can’t keep up with that.. so I’m guessing land around their server farms would be a good buy, either that or they think of better ways to use their existing infrastructure - I’m certain the supps is probably one of those ways.

    By the way - did you see my response to your great suggestions about the wordpress category pages vs real pages supp problem?

    http://groups.google.com/group/Google_Webmaster_Help-Indexing/browse_thread/thread/d30f62b048fae6f4

    Made a bit of a hack to hopefully reduce the ‘relevance’ of the cat pages, without removing their utility as a way of keeping all pages within a few clicks from the index page.

    Cheers,

    M

  4. 4 MyAvatars 0.2 On June 6th, 2007, dockarl said:

    add ’storage density’ where I mention ‘processing capacity’ above..

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