Supplemental Results and how to get out of the “Google Poo”

Author: Joe Whyte 

Do you utilize search commands like site: and link:? If so you probably have seen something that says supplemental results on some of the listings when doing a search. Supplemental results are what I like to call “the devil”, “pain in my arrrs”, “Hell Zone” or most notedly “Google poo”. Basically Google will take results on your site and put them into a supplemental search basket.

Lets hear what Google has to say about supplemental results:

Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary 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.

The index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way for you to select or change the index in which your site appears. Please be assured that the index in which a site is included does not affect its PageRank.

Here is what they are really saying:

If you do a search then results from Googles “normal” index will show up first and then the supplemental results will show up towards the end of the results. Now the reason you might be seeing supplemental results more often is that Google does not have enough pages in its normal index for that given search and will populate the SERP’s with its supplemental results.

If your site has pages that are supplemental that means you are not getting the best  use out of your indexed pages.

Reasons why Google might put your pages in its supplemental results:

1. Orphaned pages – means that your pages might not have any inbound links pointing to it or they are severely devalued.

2. Duplicate content – if you use articles from article distribution sites or copy and paste content from other peoples websites this could put that page within supplemental results.

3.  No content – if you supply mainly images or hardly any content on a page this could as well cause your pages to drop Google poo!

How do you bring your pages out of the supplemental results:

1. Get inbound links to your orphaned pages and make sure they are quality link that are relevant to your pages topic.

2. Remove all duplicate content and write your own copy for your pages.

3. If you don’t have content or enough content on these pages that are supplemental then you need to create more.

Once you make these changes your pages will be revisited and re-cached. You can also create a Google sitemap in order to help Google crawl more pages of your site. Remember that poo is dirty and Google tends to drop a lot of it so keeping up with your sites indexed pages will help your site pull up for more relevant search results.