Google Hides Supplemental Results

Google doesn’t give much away which is part of what makes the challenge of ranking well all the more interesting. Because the search engine has so many pages indexed, it’s tended to split its results across 2 indexes, one more relevant than the other. Pages that were deemed ‘less relevant’ were stored as part of the ‘supplemental index’ and this could have been for any number of reasons but it at least provided an opportunity for search marketers to identify these pages and work to convert them into more relevant content pieces and improving the overall results returned.

However, last week Google removed this feature of marking these pages as ‘Supplemental Results’. The explanation was that a huge amount of work has been done to bring the two indexes closer together therefore enhancing the quality of the results returned so there was no longer the need to identify these results separately but in reality it simply cannot work that way. As well a storage area for badly structured pages the supplemental index was a holding area for all the spam results that are generated by automated programmes designed to fool Google into high rankings. Google say they will have rolled out this combined index by the end of the summer and if they’ve finally identified a way of correctly identify spam whilst allowing genuine pages to perform better then that can only be a good thing. But, if things remain as they are with 2 separate unidentified indexes, the challenge gets even harder with many good pages being sent to ‘supplemental hell’ with no indication of where improvement is needed.