Sugarrae - Never Mess With a Woman Who Can Pull Rank

Supplemental behavior has gone from weird to weirder.

I have one site right now that has plenty of pages that should be in the main index (i.e., they have unique inbound links from trusted sources) and have gone supplemental… meanwhile pages on the site that maybe should be supplemental, aren’t.

I think it may be a combination of:
1) the main index is getting harder and harder to get into, and
2) Google kinda f*cked up with their current indexing logic.

#1 may be permanent, but #2 isn’t (hopefully)

Is this really that strange? Just based on Cutts’ comments about pages needing a certain amount of PR/linkage power to get out of supps, my inclination is to think that a brand new page that perhaps hasn’t had all of its calculations run may sit in supps for a few days until its score has been determined, at which time it pops out. I may be missing something crucial here, but for some reason, I just think this might be a normal process for brand new pages, no?

Donna, I have no doubt that’s why the new pages are sitting in supplemental (I think it’s a bit more than some internal links to pop some though)… but I’ve never seen new pages “tagged” supplemental before. The point I was trying to make in the post was that what I found weird was that supplemental seemed to be site specific now and not keyword specific - as I and some others felt it was… which seems like a change to me. New pages have taken a bit to get the “bearings” for the last few years, but seeing them tagged “supplemental” while getting those bearings is what I’m not used to. :)

Hm, well, I’m not sure I ever saw it as keyword specific, but I don’t think I ever put a lot of time into thinking about it that way, so I can’t really say. But now you’ve got me really curious. You say you’d never seen new pages “tagged” as supplemental before. But then why would you have thought they were supplemental before, if they weren’t tagged as such? Put another way…If you didn’t see the supp tag previously, why would you have thought it was a supp then? Does that make sense?

Rae,

To my knowledge supplementals have never been keyword specific. However, there are times when a page can exist in both the supplemental and regular index simultaneously. In such cases, you might return the supp version when doing a site search (especially when doing it via the wildcard-and-neg-match hack), but the non-supp version when searching on regular keywords. Could this be what you were seeing before, when you thought that the pages were only supp for certain keywords?

Also, did you rule out the possibility of the pages being in both the supplemental and regular index at the same time, and you just hitting different datacenters on different days?

@Donna - I said that I’ve seen new pages take a bit to get their “bearings” over the last few years, which isn’t to say I thought they were supplemental. It just always took a little bit for them to get their bearings. But had never seen them tagged as “supplemental” before while they were doing it. In my experience, supplemental was usually reserved for a page having an “issue” and not used to identify that “bearings” phase.

K, that clears up my confusion then. Thanks.

@Michael - that’s actually what I meant by keyword specific. i.e. if you had four pages about blue widgets and did a search in regards to blue widgets specifically, you might see three of those four go supplemental on that search query. But, if you did a search in regards to blue widgets online, a different one of the four might show up (this time, without the supp tag) with the other three (one that formerly showed as the non supplemental) showing as supplemental. So, if you changed your keyword in regards to a search, a page may or may not have gone supplemental based on being considered the best “relevance” above other pages google deemed as “supplemental” for that specific search query. Since pages would go in and out of supplemental depending on the keyword used, to me, supplemental was keyword specific.

When you did a site search, many pages would often times be considered supplemental for that specific “keyword” so to speak. It isn’t hard for many pages on your site to be considered as too close to the others for your domain name. A page being supplemental on a site search didn’t mean much. What I’m seeing now though is that all pages listed supplemental on a site search, for those I’ve checked, aren’t ranking for any keywords (not that they rank for much) without the supp tag and even have the supplemental tag when searching an entire sentence that only brings up one result - that supplemental page. So, it appears, from the queries I’ve looked at, that if a page is now showing as supplemental during a site search, it really *is* supplemental, even on keyword based queries.

I hope all that rambling made sense. Again, I just started to notice this - for all I know it has been happening for a while. But, to me, it’s new. That and the supplemental tag hitting new pages.

And if that didn’t make sense, well, it’s 1 am here and I’ve had a long day. My “explain what is going on in my hyper mind” skills may not be at their best. ;-)

Rae,

It makes sense, but I think you missed what I was saying. Pages can exist in both the supplemental index and non supplemental index at the same time. It’s not that the page has been tagged both ways, it’s that there are actually two copies of the same page.

Pages don’t get tagged as supplemental per se, it’s not a field in the database that acts as a flag… it is a separate database (well, set of servers holding the database) altogether. Whether or not a page exists in the supplemental index is solely a function of link strength, or how much PageRank it has at any given moment.

It isn’t hard for many pages on your site to be considered as too close to the others for your domain name.

As far as I know that is a misconception. The concept of “too close” doesn’t feed into whether or not a page is supplemental (I know, many people will swear otherwise). If you see pages in the supplemental index, then at some point Google determined that there wasn’t enough PageRank to warrant them being in the main index. It should be the case that once it moves them into the main index, it no longer returns those supp pages… but the Google datacenters are never 100% in sync, as we all know.

I think what you are seeing now is pages that were purely supplemental from the get go, which is normal depending on your site structure. For most blogs, you wouldn’t see this behavior, since the newest content is found from a link near the top of the homepage… in fact, you would tend to see the reverse, with the older a post gets the further it gets from the main link juice, and the more danger it has of going supp. But with regular sites, unless you take care to have multiple focused entry pages, each with their own incoming link supply, and make sure to build off of those nodes, then often times the newer pages start out deep to begin with.

@Michael - See, this is exactly why I post things that pose question in my mind - alternative viewpoints, in depth discussion and even more things to think about. So, first and foremost, thanks Michael for all the posts. Second, it is now 2 a.m. and my official “you’re not allowed to expire domains after this time because it never seems to be as good of an idea in the morning” limit has been reached, so bear with me. ;-)

supplemental index is solely a function of link strength, or how much PageRank it has at any given moment

Now, again, as I said in my post, I haven’t watched supplemental very closely in a long time. That said, we had a site we overhauled about two months ago with about 65% of its pages in supplemental. We changed the content - kept it on theme, but changed all of the wording and gave everything unique titles and metas, along with new content on the page itself. These pages, as they began to get re-crawled, popped from holding the supplemental tags. We didn’t embark on a new link campaign. That said, we did change the internal linking structure to make more sense to users and give us more value with the spiders. As more and more pages dropped the supplemental tag, the site kept moving up and up in ranks. We also have other sites utilizing the same internal linking structure, with the same average strength in links that have a large portion of pages still in supplemental (older sites we haven’t touched in a long time). So, something else for me to think about.

I’m definitely not saying links has nothing to do with it - but I’m hesitant to agree to it being the sole/only factor without some of my own testing. Nothing personal - I’m the first person to say “test everything you hear”. As I mentioned, I haven’t paid much attention to this in the last year, though I’ve read a lot of posts complaining about it. I never thought it would be a problem that I’m a strong and agressive link developer, but apparently it has kept me from having to pay much attention to supplemental if your take on it is correct (links being the sole factor) - and I’m not agreeing to agree or disagree at 2 am. :P

Also, Michael - am I to take it that in your opinion, supplemental is acting the same today as it was say - two years ago?

I know with absolutely no doubt in my mind that at least until fairly recently, dup content, or even dup meta descriptions could land a page in supplemental. However, I stopped paying attention to supps a few months back, so it’s conceivable that the landscape has changed. Still, I’d make Michael prove his statement. :)

Hehe. Everything that DD said.
- there have historically been a variety of reasons that pages show up as supp
- since Big Daddy the basic nature of supps changed (and clue: anyone who doesn’t get what Big Daddy was all about can’t possibly be well equipped to understand what’s been going on since then, and that includes the changed nature of supps)
- being in supps was once worse than it is now; since Big Daddy being in supp is a different indicator (I would not be surprised to see the visible indication of supp go away altogether at some point)
- that there continue to be a variety of reasons that pages appear as supp; again, read DD’s posts

Personally I’ve always regarded it as an issue affected by both domain and page/query. Though as the nature of how/why a page appears in the supps has changed, the presence of a page or group of pages in the supps still appears to me to be related to both domain issues and page/query specifics.

I own sites that have lots of pages with decent TBPR that are in supp, for reasons more along the lines of DD pointed out. Earlier this year, we ran another test, and broke a bunch out just to see if we could easily, and we did. The issue, and what we did to resolve it, had nothing to do with PR (though PR can and does play a role).

Rae, you’re forgetting the fact that Google’s pumping more man power into link analysis. The value passed by a set of links can shift over time, depending on how much Google trust your linking practices. PageRank isn’t about just X number of pages from a TBPR Y page anymore.

Also keep in mind, even if you don’t do any kind of link building, if domains linking to domains linking to you publish more pages, delete pages, gain links, or have shifts in how Google evaluates their links, the amount of PageRank landing on your site can shift on a daily basis.

For more supplemental info, read my latest post:

Got Supplementals? PageRank is Only the Beginning

[...] talks about supplementals and how to evolve as an affiliate (but unfortunately no Bon [...]

Ok, I’ve had enough time to look around at some supplemental stuff and I call bullshit on links/linkpopularity/pagerank being the only thing that knocks a page supplemental - content used to and still does. It’s a combo thing - either can get you supplemental - though it seems a very specific gameplan is required to get you out. ;-)

Gimme a url and I’ll prove you wrong :)

I dug up the only supplemental result on sugarrae.com:

http://www.sugarrae.com/blog/sugarrae-flash-game/

and pointed links to it from my blog. It only took 3 days for that page to be re-included in the main index.

Coincidentally, the page’s cache is exactly 3 days old.

BTW, I don’t think anyone is claiming PageRank is the only factor. But if you got a TBPR 2 site that doesn’t stick, the reason is obvious.

A URL can show as normal for some search results and the same URL can show as Supplemental for other searches…

Usually the Supplemental Result is attached to content from an older version of the page. Indeed, it can show words in the snippet that no longer actually exist on the page, but are still stored in Google’s “snippet database” (my terminology), and still rank for those words, even though those words are NOT seen in the attached cache copy.

This behaviour has been around for several years, but has eveolved in the last few months and is continuing to evolve. There is a ton of info on WMW threads in the last two years on this topic.

It seems that Google have killed their Supplimental results. I can’t see Supplimental result for any of my site. Is that the case with others too ?