kathdawson
1st August 2007, 13:30
News from Google last night http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html (http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2007/07/supplemental-goes-mainstream.html)
In summary..... the supplemental index still exists but now we won't be able to identify which pages are in the main index and which are in supplemental as the tag saying "Supplemental Result" has disappeared!
Supplemental pages are often pages that are old or have duplicate content - being in the supplemental index was referred to as "Google Hell" as these pages would only show up in the SERPs if there was very little competition. Pretty good for long tail search but hopeless for mainstream, popular searches.
By being able to see which pages are supplemental it was at least an indicator for webmasters and SEOs as to which pages needed improvement - now that distinction has gone! Google do appear to be indicating that all pages will be indexed equally by the end of the summer but until then it looks like we will be flying blind.
How do you feel about the supplemental result tag disappearing?
Cheers,
Kath
In summary..... the supplemental index still exists but now we won't be able to identify which pages are in the main index and which are in supplemental as the tag saying "Supplemental Result" has disappeared!
Supplemental pages are often pages that are old or have duplicate content - being in the supplemental index was referred to as "Google Hell" as these pages would only show up in the SERPs if there was very little competition. Pretty good for long tail search but hopeless for mainstream, popular searches.
By being able to see which pages are supplemental it was at least an indicator for webmasters and SEOs as to which pages needed improvement - now that distinction has gone! Google do appear to be indicating that all pages will be indexed equally by the end of the summer but until then it looks like we will be flying blind.
How do you feel about the supplemental result tag disappearing?
Cheers,
Kath