While using Google search to check website rankings, many webmasters find their pages are listed as being ‘Supplemental Result’. Supplemental listings is not good news for webmasters as it usually means that specific webpage won’t be seen in the normal Google index unless there aren’t many other quality sites for them to list.
Supplemental pages are ones that Google considers to be low quality. Reasons for this vary and are listed below:
(1) Not enough text (content) on the page.
(2) Pages that you don’t link to yourself within your own website, will be listed as supplemental. In other words orphan pages.
(3) We’ve also noticed Google seems very good at picking up “Part 2” of tutorials and listing them as supplemental. This makes sense when you think about it. Why send a visitor to “Part 2” when they need to read part one first.
(3) Duplicate content will also be listed as supplemental. This is one of the major changes that came about with the last Big Daddy Google updates. What is duplicate content? Duplicate content is that which is closely similar to another. This highly affects affiliates where all members’ are pre-selling the same product therefore making many websites with similar content. In these cases, Google lists the original website and places most others in supplemental.
How to find what web pages are listed as supplemental.
The easiest way to find what pages are in supplemental is do a site search in Google. For example, simply type in site:www.yourwebsite.com (changing the URL to your website). Scroll through all the pages listed within the search for those indexed as “Supplemental Result”.
When you find them, have a good hard look at the page and ask yourself if it is quality, original content. Being listed as supplemental isn’t all bad news. At least you know what pages Google doesn’t consider high quality and have the chance to change it before the next indexing.
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Comments (2)
Let me have a rant...
The google "big daddy" changes seemed to get a lot of duplicate content sites thrown off their main index yet it seems as though the real cheats have been rewarded for the underhanded way they are making their sites.
I have been trying hard to work out why a site of mine went from good listings to almost no listings at all. It is an affiliate site so I thought ok, its duplicate content.
Then I look at some other sites and try to work out why they have first page listings and wow, cheating is alive and well with google.
Here's just 2 on the one page that I found.
First Example Here Look at the source code, hidden images 1 pixel in height, full of key words in the alt tags...
Second Example Here Watch closely as the page loads, there's a layer chock full of hidden keywords that do not show on the page when loaded, then they scrambled the source code to try to cover their bums.
I know I'm not game enough to cheat the spiders but it sure is paying off for them as the first was no1 and the second listed at no5 .....
I hate "Big Daddy" ...
Posted by Walkabout | January 10, 2007 7:31 AM
Posted on January 10, 2007 07:31
I found this information very useful. I checked for my supplementals and now I am really serious about keywords. I downloaded a free keyword tool that looks at Overture from your desktop.
http://www.goodkeywords.com/products/gkw/
It's very useful not having to go to Overture every time you want to check for keywords.
By the way, hypergurl, I have a firefox add-on called SeaQuake and I can check your site for keyword density but also for your traffic via an Alexa check. Wow, you sure do get a lot of traffic so your keywords must be good, but your keyword density could be better. I guess you don't need to worry though.
Gidday Jenny
Nice to hear from you again. Thanks for the link to Good Keywords. I wasn't aware of that one. I find keyword checks are useful for seeing if your using the most effective words for any specific page. For example, sometimes changing one word in your title or on your page can make a huge difference in visitors. For instance there is a huge difference in the numbers of people who search web tools in comparison to website tools. In reference to keyword density I think there should be a good balance. I know of many designers who have been banned from Google for being spammy. So therefore it's important not to overdo the keyword density.
Anyway, was nice to hear from you again. Hope things aren't getting too cold for you down there in Melbourne ;)
All the best.
Tanya.
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Posted by Jenny | June 28, 2007 10:28 AM
Posted on June 28, 2007 10:28