Understanding Supplemental Results

Should you be worried about Google's Supplemental Results?

Google has a two tier system for indexing pages on the Internet: a Main Index, and a Supplemental Index.

And as the name suggests, the Main Index contains pages that Google feels are important, and the Supplemental Index contains those leftover pages just don't carry the same weight. And of course it follows that pages in the Supplemental Index have little or no chance of ranking well in the search engine results.

How can you tell if your website is relegated to the depths of Supplemental Results?

Go to Google and enter: site:www.yourdomainname.co.uk and go to the last page of the search results.

Take a look to see how many of your pages are tagged as Supplemental Results


It is normal to have a proportion of your pages in Supplemental Results, but if you have a lot of Supplemental pages then it may be a signal that something is wrong with your search engine optimisation strategy.

There are a number of reasons why your pages might be in the Supplemental Index. Some common culprits:

• duplicate content
  
• duplicated Title Tags across pages, or identical meta tags
• a lack of content on each page (very typical of ecommerce product pages)
• a lack of links to the page
• the page used to have inbound links, but those links have now disappeared.
  

I noticed a number of my own pages have slipped into the Supplemental Results, and we've taken the following actions:

1. My Blog was creating postings that contained nearly identical Title Tags. It was prefacing every blog posting Title Tag with "Internet Marketing." So we've turned that off, and will keep an eye on the Supplemental results.
2. Getting more inbound links to internal pages of this website, rather than just to the home page.
   

I'm finding a number of companies having trouble with Supplemental Results, and they seem to have in common the use of Content Management Systems (CMS) or Ecommerce Systems that are introducing some of these negative factors. They also seem to have few inbound links except to their home page.

So, it's best to avoid falling into the Supplemental trap by getting a range of inbound links across your whole. site. In particular get high quality links to the valuable pages that you want to pull out of Supplemental Results which in turn will help Google to reindex those pages.