Take the 2-minute tour ×
Webmasters Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for pro webmasters. It's 100% free, no registration required.

We have had problems with our web pages being put into Google's Supplemental Index. We have recently corrected what we believe were all the problems that might have caused this. However, Google still seems to be taking new content and putting it straight into its Supplemental Pages index. Have we incurred some sort of Supplemental Penalty and everything we now generate will more likely go into the Supplemental Index or is it likely something is still wrong with our website? We only put the new content up 2 days ago and it is already in the Supplemental Index!

Any help is much appreciated!

share|improve this question

2 Answers 2

up vote 4 down vote accepted

There's a lot of speculation about what causes a page to go into Google's Supplemental Index but the only official explanation from Google as to why this may happen was from Matt Cutts when he announced that they were no longer labeling supplemental results as such. His explanation was:

These are often pages with lower PageRank or those with more complex URLs.

Working from that information the odds are that your new pages have a low PageRank and are relegated to the supplemental index for now. That makes sense as your new pages (two days old is very new) have not had a chance to get new links and for those links to be found and factored in by Google yet.

As always with anything that has to do with SEO you need to be patient. Good rankings don't come quickly for anyone. But sites that have quality content (and good usability and accessibility) always rise over time. If your site is good it will do the same.

share|improve this answer

One thing to keep in mind is that Google doesn't label supplemental results any more, so you can't really judge whether or not a URL is in the old supplemental index anyway. Some of the "tools" that try to do this use obscure methods that really don't reflect the internal status, so you can't really trust them anyway.

Personally, I would not even bother worrying about it. The old supplemental index is well integrated into the search results (which is why the URLs are no longer labeled) and in the meantime, the infrastructure - as well as the crawling, indexing and ranking processes - have changed significantly enough that it's not worth the time to look at things like that (even assuming you could get accurate information on whether or not a URL is in the old supplemental index).

As John Conde mentioned, good rankings don't come quickly. Focus on your users, focus on your website and its content, and let Google worry about the indexing part. :)

share|improve this answer

Your Answer

 
discard

By posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service.
{"cc_re__cc_re__cc_by_sa_3_0": ["                  <li><a href=\"//area51.stackexchange.com\" title=\"proposing new sites in the Stack Exchange network\">Area 51</a></li>\r\n                        <li><a href=\"//careers.stackoverflow.com\">Stack Overflow Careers</a></li>\r\n                    \r\n                </ol>\r\n            </td>\r\n    </tr>\r\n</table>\r\n                </div>\r\n            </div>\r\n\r\n            <div id=\"copyright\">\r\n                site design / logo &#169; 2015 stack exchange inc; user contributions licensed under <a href=\"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/\" rel=\"license\">cc by-sa 3.0</a> \r\n                with <a href=\"http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/\" rel=\"license\">attribution required</a>\r\n            </div>\r\n            <div id=\"svnrev\">\r\n                rev 2015.5.22.2602\r\n            </div>\r\n            \r\n        </div>\r\n    </div>\r\n    <noscript>\r\n        <div id=\"noscript-warning\">Webmasters Stack Exchange works best with JavaScript enabled<img src=\"http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-c1rF4kxgLUzNc.gif\" alt=\"\" class=\"dno\"></div>"], "copyright__copyright__copyright": ["- have changed significantly enough that it's not worth the time to look at things like that (even assuming you could get accurate information on whether or not a URL is in the old supplemental index).\n\nAs John Conde mentioned, good rankings don't come quickly. Focus on your users, focus on your website and its content, and let Google worry about the indexing part. :)\n\nshare|improve this answer\n\nYour Answer\n\n\u00a0\ndiscard\n\nBy posting your answer, you agree to the privacy policy and terms of service."]}