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Status: Closed Points: 75 Time: 06:31 - Feb 21, 2007  

theDude

how to know if a site has gone supplemental in google's index?

I have a website that is not getting the amount of search traffic from google that I expected.
I have read about google's supplemental index and I'm wondering how I would know if some of the pages of the site has gone into that index?

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jgivoni

Date:: Feb 24, 2007

Time:: 11:15

It appears to me that if you get results from the supplemental index, it would say so next to the listing. I don't know if this is in fact so, since I have never seen this for myself.
What a strange thing - supplemental index...

theDude

Date:: Feb 24, 2007

Time:: 16:11

Well, it's their way of separating the good from the rest. I guess it's a way to sort out their "proven" trusted relevant sites and all the rubbish spam or non-important sites, instead of just throwing the last ones out completely.
But the problem is with my site that I have pages that come up if I search for site:mydomain.com but don't come up even if i search for terms that are very specific for the pages. And it's not all the pages that this is happening for, only some of them. So I really don't know if it's because they don't find the pages very relevant or they have been completely moved to the supplemental index and thus don't show up in the searches.
At least from what I've read, google no longer serves results from the supplemental index if they don't find enough relevant results in the main index. So I don't know what it is for anymore and I don't know how to be sure that a page ended there.

jgivoni

Date:: Feb 25, 2007

Time:: 02:52

Oh, well, I haven't read the latest news about Google's supplemental index and obviously I can't answer your question.

But I do have some thoughts about the subject :-)
First, if your pages come up for site:yourdomain.com I would guess that they were still in the main index, otherwise why would they appear at all, if Google is not serving from the supplemental?
Is the search with "site:" different from other searches?

Second, dividing pages into two indexes clearly is not in the interest of the users nor webmasters. It might be a handy, good and even performance enhancing thing on the server-end, but honestly, for the users it's completely irrelevant from where the matches came - Florida or Kenya - as long as they are the most relevant for your search. Google has always tried to return the most relevant first and the less relevant last, so having a primary and a secondary index is not bringing anything new to the scene. Furthermore, dividing pages into "good" and "bad" must be arbitrary - what is the treshold? How many pages in each of them?
I don't understand why Google tells us about a supplemental index without explaining exactly how it works and why it is of importance to them.

Jakob

theDude

Date:: Feb 25, 2007

Time:: 07:50

Well, I think this is not really the place to discuss whether the supplemental index is good or not.
You can read google's own view on that and other google issues on Matt Cutts blog here: www.mattcutts.com/blog/
The fact is it exists, and that I don't know how to be sure if that's where my pages have gone or they're just not deemed relevant in general.

jgivoni

Date:: Feb 25, 2007

Time:: 10:26

Not a very nice comment, theDude, but thanks for the link (though I couldn't find anything about Google's own wiev on the index).

jgivoni

Date:: Feb 28, 2007

Time:: 10:36

Update:
I just did a site:mydomain.com search and got 4 pages as a result.
The last one had the words "Supplemental Result" written on the last line between the size and the "Cached" link.

theDude

Date:: Feb 28, 2007

Time:: 17:31

sorry if you took my comment as an offense, I was only trying to guide the thread towards what my problem is. The discussion about the google index is fine, but it sort of distracts anybody that might know the answer to my problem.
i didn't see "supplemental result" on any of my pages, so maybe that means that they aren't in the supplemental index...

theDude

Date:: Jun 04, 2007

Time:: 01:48

well, going to close this one...

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