Reasons why a page ends up in the Google supplemental index


Google has and uses two indexes: The Main Index and The Supplemental Index. There are numerous reasons why a page eventually ends up in the Supplemental Index. Maybe it's a "stale" page, or it could be due to Google's difficulty in completely indexing the page. You can also look at the Supplemental Index as the last "holding ground" for a page before it gets dumped from Google's index completely.

How can you tell if your site has pages listed in the Supplemental Index? I've taken the guess work out of it with my Google Supplemental Index Locator, or GSI Locator for short.

Let's clear up a major misconception and discuss what the Supplemental Index (SI) isn't: it's not the Google Sandbox that new sites get thrown into. It is something completely different. Sites young and old get pages thrown to the SI, even I get pages in the SI. and never always on purpose.

Pages in the SI don't rank well, period. This is why you want to get your pages out of the Supplemental Index - especially if you run a hostile AdSense campaign. Having just one page in the SI could be costing you hundreds, otherwise thousands of dollars per month.

What is one of the major causes pages get into the SI? Deficiencies in internal links. When Google performs a deep crawl on your site, it compares the pages it found with those in its index. If there are pages in the index that GoogleBot didn't fetch in the deep crawl, Google knows that those pages are no longer accessible through an internal link - therefore, Google sees them as being "phased out" by you. Those same pages are then moved to the SI.

Obviously, this is just one of the many ways your pages wind up in the SI, and it is one of the most common based on my testing.

Myth: If you have pages in the SI, those pages contain "SPAM elements". You should clean up your site.

Fact: Untrue. Pages don't get placed in the SI for SPAM. They get removed or penalized from the index for SPAM. The SI is not a SPAM repository.

Pages that haven't been updated for one year or more have a 68% chance of being placed in the SI. Update the page therefore the file size changes +/- 1% (42% effectiveness). This wasn't as successful when i thought it would be and it has gotten worse. There are lots of forum posts and articles available that state this is whatever you need to do to get from the SI. Test results show differently. You have more work to do.

Alter the heading tag, update the Title, and add significant changes to the body content. You may want to invest in a rewrite of the article. Since the article hasn't been touched in annually or more, chances are very good that things have changed and the article is out of date. Now, what if you perform a complete rewrite and there's no change in the file size, do you need to make more changes? No. File dimensions are not the issue here, it can be the same and there will be no difference in the success rate. The issue is new content. (93% effectiveness).

The page in question no longer has a link directly from the house page or a main category page. Pages that lost their link inside the site itself (not backlinks) have a 72% chance of being placed in the SI. Get a link on the home page or a main category page towards the page in question (95% success rate). If you place a link from the main category page, verify that the page shows up in the Google index.

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Note: This article was sent to us by: Keith B. Reed at 02242011

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