At the beginning of this post I will do a quick revision about Google supplemental index assuming that some people those are reading this post don’t know about it. Almost two years before Google has created a supplemental index in addition to its main index but pages in this index:
- Are not crawled as frequently as the main index (when the supplemental index started supplemental pages were not updated for more than once every three months)
- Most likely they will not rank for competitive keywords, Google tends to show them when they don’t find adequate results in the main index.
To make the story short, when your page marked is supplemental it is died (from seo standpoint). In the past Google got use to mark the supplement page so it was easy to know about them:
What happened few month before is that Google turned this mark off, so it is getting harder now to find out about those pages. What happened after is that many webmasters forgot completely about them considering that Google doesn’t have the supplemental index any more.
I want to assure for you folks that supplemental index still exist like before and many of your pages might be affected by this and you don’t know, it is just getting harder to find about them. You need not some manual investigations to know about them, if you see a page on your website that has gone from a good ranking to the pavilion most likely it went into supplemental page. Here is one of my posts that was ranking well for the phrase “SE O Training in Toronto” which is not very competitive one, but a month before it doesn’t shown anywhere for this term.
So if you agree with me that the supplemental pages are still exist, it is time to go through some recommendations to keep your pages away from supplemental index:
- Try to pass link power to you important page using intelligent internal navigation or building inbound links directly for those pages not just for your home page.
- Make sure to have enough text on each pages to make it look unique, avoid also using duplicate titles/meta tags for your pages.
- Don’t use duplicate content on your pages
