If you find that your traffic from Google is falling off precipitously, pages in your web site may be getting moved in to Google’s supplemental result index. Google’s Supplemental Results is a secondary database that Google uses to park pages that it feels may not meet its standards. These pages rarely–if ever–show up in search results. There is a wide range of reasons that Google uses to weed out individual pages that it does not deem to be worthy of placement on its search results pages.

You can see if Google has moved any of your site’s pages into Supplemental Results by using the site query command to view all the pages that Google has indexed for a site.

site:mydomainname.com

Just substitute your site’s domain name in the site query command and results will display all of the site’s pages that are in Google’s index. The same query works for MSN and Yahoo, but they do not have a method for identifying Web pages that have been penalized. You want to scan through all the listings for a site. Most of the Supplemental Results pages are listed toward the end. Many sites have a few pages flagged, but in a worst-case scenario, it’s not unusual to see almost every page listed as a Supplemental Result.

If you see the dreaded words "Supplemental Result" to the right of a Web page’s URL in the last line, that page has been moved to the Supplemental Results index.

What is a Supplemental Result?

Simply put, Supplemental Results are pages that Google has deemed to be unworthy of admission into their main database. These pages have been moved to a different database where they will rarely, if ever, show up in search results.

What did I do to receive a penalty from Google?

In May 2006, Google recently began moving large numbers of Web pages to its Supplemental Results database. Many pages are in clear violation of Google’s published Webmaster Guidelines, while others have been caught and flagged by a new criteria that Google just added to its algorithms. Many pages banished to Supplemental Results do not appear to be in violation of any Google guidelines and therefore may be the result of an error in their ranking algorithm.

From our observations, it appears that the following practices that may trigger the Supplemental Result penalty:

• Duplicate Content - Make sure that every page in your site contains unique content and every page is represented by one and only one URL. If you are duplicating pages in your site under different URLs or are repeating full pages of content, your pages will likely be flagged. This also applies to content that is added to your site from another site, such as free article sites. Don’t use content from another site, even if you do have permission. Every page in a site should ideally have absolutely unique content.
• Affiliate Marketing Links - If a Web page contains links to other sites that include an affiliate identifier, or if the links run through an affiliate network server, such as Commission Junction, ShareASale, Linkshare or others, the page will likely be flagged as a Supplemental Result. It may help if you substitute these with JavaScript links. Search engine spiders do not normally follow JavaScript links.
• Links to Bad Neighborhoods - Google does not like reciprocal linking or artificial link building schemes that include purchased links. They are particularly sensitive about the pages that you link to on the Internet. The theory is that while you do not always have control over who links to your site, you do have control over the sites that you link to. Ideally, you want to have all of the outgoing links on your site point to industry-related sites and have all of the inbound links to your site come from industry-related sites. This is clearly not practical for most small site owners, but it’s hard to argue with a computer algorithm.
• Old, Stale Content - If you have a lot of pages in your site that never change, you may find them creeping into the supplemental result index. If this happens, do some rewriting and refresh the content on these pages.
• Lack of Content - Every page needs content or it may end up in the supplemental result index. Text in images is not content and pages full of links are not content. Form pages and login pages are particularly susceptible to this.
• Nothing at All - We’ve seen numerous instances of sites with unique content and do not appear to violate any of Google’s known guidelines or rules, yet most or all of the site’s pages are in Supplemental Results.

So How Do I Get My Pages Out of Supplemental Results?

That’s a good question and one that a lot of people of testing and experimenting with. First, you need to make sure that the content on each of your pages is absolutely unique. Do not borrow or copy content from other Web sites and do not allow others to copy your content.

Second, if your site includes affiliate links, you need to decide whether or not participation in affiliate programs is something that you need to continue. There are ways to exclude certain pages from a search engine’s database using the robots.txt file, or a link attribute called "nofollow", or by using form buttons that spiders theoretically cannot follow or by using JavaScript links. None of these methods has thus far proven to be 100% reliable for removing pages from this secondary index.

Third, be careful who you link to. While links to other sites are looked upon favorably by search engines, links to totally unrelated sites frequently are not. It may be a good idea to place links to industry-leading sites wherever it is appropriate to do so. For obvious reasons, reciprocal linking programs are almost guaranteed to get a site into trouble, particularly when you respond to e-mail requests for reciprocal links. One-way links to your site from industry-related sites are always much better.

The problem with getting pages out of the Supplemental Result database is that once pages are added to this index, the Google spider ceases regular visits and only rarely returns to the pages. Thus, any actions you take may require some time before you see results.

A few things to add to this:

• Google insists that the Supplemental Result index is not a penalty box. OK, but if it removes a web page from the main index and reduces the page’s ability to rank well, it sounds like a penalty to me.
• Google recently announced that they will be removing the Supplemental Result indicator from the results found in the site query. That does not mean that the Supplemental Result index is going away; it just means that you will not know that a page has been moved there.

For additional insight regarding the Supplemental Result issue, visit Matt Cutts’ blog. Matt is a Google engineer who works with the SEO industry.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 5th, 2007 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Search Engines. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.