Google Supplemental Results

In addition to this site, I run several others all of which are fairly small i.e. less than 100 pages. During part of the regular SEO maintenance I do, I decided to check on the status of these other sites in Google. It seems that pages from some of my other sites have somehow been relegated to the supplemental index.

The supplemental index is Google's way of storing web pages without making them available as search results. That is, these web pages are very unlikely to show when there are alternative results in the regular index. The more official description from Google reads:

"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."

That reads like a lot of mumbo-jumbo so I'm not even going to try and pick it apart. Rather, it's important to note that having pages in the supplemental index seriously and negatively impacts the chances of getting organic search traffic from Google. And equally important is that once a page gets in to the supplemental index it is very unlikely it'll ever be moved to the regular index.

One thing I'm not sure about is whether new sites are treated differently than old sites. That is, do new sites, like the ones I have, go in to the supplemental index temporarily? Or will they be treated the same as an old site and are stuck where they are? I'm hoping for the former. I've also collected the following suggestions from various blogs and forums on how to get out of Google's supplemental index.

1. Reduce duplicate content. I have none on my sites.
2. Increase the number of internal links. I'm OK on this front.
3. Increase the number of external links. I fall short here. They're new sites after all.
4. Make updates to the site often. I do for 3 out of the 4 sites.
5. Make sure content on each page is "substantial". This is true on 3 of the 4 sites.
6. Your Title and Description meta tags are all identical. Mine aren't.

So of the 6 suggestions identified above, I'm going to work on item 3 as it looks like I'm doing alright everywhere else. There's also another step-by-step process at SEO RoundTable that I'll have to consider trying should things remain unchanged.

The following will serve as my record for my sites which have gone in to the supplemental index. I've used a two letter code to identify the sites rather than the actual names.

• Google Sitemap Program
• Accidental 404 Errors... Ugh.
• Tweaking the Cutline WordPress Theme
• Duplicate Content and SEO
• SEO Checklist