Supplemental Results

Google uses two indexes for its search results. The normal index and the supplemental results index.

Google defines supplemental results as follows:

“A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank.”

If your site pages are listed in the supplemental results, it is likely that your pages could not be parsed correctly by Google’s standard crawler.

What’s the problem with Google’s supplemental results?  If your web pages are listed in the supplemental results then they won’t be returned very often for regular search queries.

How can you find out if your web pages are in the supplemental results?

An easy way to find out how many of your pages are listed in Google’s supplemental results is to search for the following on Google.com:

site:www.domain.com ***

Replace www.domain.com

with your own domain name.  Search for that phrase and then proceed to the last result pages to find the supplemental results.

How can you get out of Google’s supplemental results?

Make sure that your site doesn’t contain any spam elements.  Focus on ethical “white hat” SEO techniques.

Make it easy for search engines to index your web pages — in other words whenever possible don’t use web page URLs that contain question marks or the & symbol.

Make your site easy to find for hte Googlebot. The more links that point to your site, the more likely it is that search engine crawlers will come across your site.

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