Checking Google Supplemental
Published August 5, 2008 by Mike Seddon
Remember when you could check if you were in Google supplemental results?
Remember the great cries when they stopped telling us which pages were in supplemental and which were in the one true index?
Well, guess what. It appears you can still find out which index your pages are in. Hooray!
For those who don’t know, the supplemental index was a back up index that Google will uses. It only displays pages from this backup index if it cannot find enough matches on its main index.
The truth is that if you have pages in the supplemental index then you are hardly likely to ever get displayed by Google and if you do it will be so far down the listings that you are unlikely to get any traffic worth speaking of.
So, no one wants to be in the supplementals. Back in the days when you could see the supplemental index, I wrote a quick guide myself on how to check and how to get out of the supplemental index.
The great news now is that it appears you can use an “undocumented feature” to see which of your pages are in the main index and which are in the supplemental index.
Type this command into Google.
site:www.mydomain,com/*
where mydomain is the name of your domain (eg: site:www.kksmarts.com/*)
The pages listed are those that are in the Main Index.
If you type site:www.mydomain.com (ie: without /*) then you will get a list of all of your pages that are in both indexes. So the ones that are in this list but not in the first list are your supplemental pages!
I haven’t seen any official comment yet about this - what is everyone else’s experience?
Filed under Google
Very interesting.
I can see that certain pages of mine have ended up in the supplemental index only. Most visited and most ‘linked to’ pages all feature in the main index, though.
Now the obvious question would be: How do you make sure that all your pages end up in the main index?
Wow thats really interesting!! I can see that the only page in the main index is my home page, everything else is in the supplemental index. Which makes sense, because none of my pages except the home page end up in Google for any search query.
So yes, I’m with Mikelitus- how do you get those pages into the main index?
A very interesting finding, thanks for that.
Although I always thought that if your in ’supplemental’ then it means you have too much duplicate content rather than it being a ‘backup copy’ of the index. If you have loads of pages in supplemental then adding unique and fresh content to the page normally lifts it out and back into the main index.
Ta
Baz