Supplemental Resuts and Google’s Update
We were getting quite a few reports during the last few months that people were seeing their sites come up in the search results of Google with the tag supplemental results. What does this mean and why was this happening?
Google keeps a separate index of sites known as the supplemental index that it uses when it can’t get enough hits for a query on its main index. This index primarily contains sites with duplicate content, little or no content, or old sites that no longer have links into them. Obviously, this is not a place you want your web site. Your pages won’t rank for anything here. You want your pages in the main index. To see if you have any pages in the supplemental index, you can search using site:yourdomain.xxx, where your yourdomain.xxx is your domain name. Pages in the supplemental index will be tagged as such.
The problem was more acute the last few months as Google tried to fix the problem of canonical sites. For Google, http://www.yourdoman.com is a different page from http://yourdomain.com. PageRank gets split between the two and you have duplicate entries. The last indexing was trying to resolve this problem so that Google would see one site as the canonical, or main site. During this indexing time Google was pushing a lot of stuff into the supplemental index.
The indexing cycle is now finished, however, and you shouldn’t see the supplemental indexing problem with a good site now. If you do, one Google employee has suggested letting him (or her) know at sesnyc06@gmail.com. Better yet, follow the directions in our previous post to use 301 redirects to help Google know what your canonical pages are.