Avoiding Supplemental Indexing of your Site’s Pages

Supplemental Result is a URL residing in Google’s supplemental index, a secondary database containing pages of less importance, as measured primarily by Google’s Page Rank algorithm. Google’s supplementary index, is an auxiliary index where it stores some documents it may not trust enough to include in its regular index. Supplemental search results are used to provide search results when not enough regular search results are available.

The importance of a page is measured by the number and quality of links pointing at it. The degree to which Google trusts a site’s inbound links also influences the importance of a page. If Google detects paid links, for example, it will devalue the links or nullify them completely so that Page Rank will not pass to the target page.

A supplemental page will still rank in search results, but only if there are not enough pages in the main index that are returned within the search.

Causes of Supplemental Results

Duplicate Content. Some people believe that the supplemental index is Google’s way of filtering out duplicate content. TITLE elements, META descriptions tags, and navigational text that are similar or identical can lead to duplicate or near-duplicate content.

Low PageRank. However, duplicate content is a side effect of supplemental results, not the cause. Instead, low PageRank is the primary cause of supplemental results. Links to multiple versions of the same page dilutes PageRank across multiple URLs, thus increasing their chance of not reaching a minimum PageRank threshold. If a page’s PageRank is too low, Google will drop it from its main index. That page will appear in search results as a supplemental result.

Lack of Trust. Manipulative linking practices can also lower PageRank flow into a domain, thus creating more supplemental pages. Manipulative links include excessive reciprocal linking, link injections, and paid links. Questionable outlinks can also lead to link devaluation.

High Page Count. A large site with a high page count is also generally more vulnerable to the supplemental index than a small site because inbound PageRanks divided among several hundred thousand pages tend to be lower than that divided up among only a few dozen pages.

Page Freshness. Page freshness is also a factor.

Avoiding Supplemental Index

It’s not really hard to get pages back into the main index if your site is established and clean. The easiest ways to get pages out of the supplemental index and mostly preferred are as follows:

1. Create a link to the supplemental page from a page that’s ranking well in the site or on the home page. The home page is usually the one’s used and probably works best.
2. Create a "best of" page on your site listing all the pages that are important and link to that page from every other page.
3. Create a site map and link to that from every page, including your home page.
4. Try to attract real quality inbound links from other sites to that particular page.
5. Add more quality material to contents that are too little or thin on that page.

Summing up, the chances of a page that will wind up in the supplemental index is increased if the page has few or no inbound or internal links. Getting your site’s pages out of the supplemental results is one way of optimizing and improving the page rank of your site. You can also check out other strategies on improving search engine rank by subscribing to Dream Ware Enterprise’s system called Monopolizing Marketing.