I’ll be the first to admit that I haven’t kept on top of the way supplemental issues the way victoria secret lotion keeps on top of a stripper – hey, laugh if you want, I swear they *all* wear it. But, in the last week or so, I’ve been taking a closer look at it, after stumbling onto something on “accident”, and figured I’d share the weirdness I’m seeing and see if anyone else has some weirdness to share.
When I first noticed it, I mentioned it to the supplemental whore and he had mentioned to me that he had been seeing the supplemental oddities here and there for a while, but had seen a lot more of them since the last update noticeable tweak to the Google search results.
I have a particular site that is extremely popular in its niche and does very well across all three engines (aka defensible). I really have never bothered to “scour” its listings in Google because there has never been a reason to. But, last week we added a new section to the site and some new pages. Now, the new section was heavy on pictures that the writer had taken for the task and lower on word count. So, I was making sure the pages got indexed and weren’t suffering as a result. I was a little surprised by what I found…
First let me preface by saying I’ve always agreed that a supplemental query was keyword specific and not site specific, but after what I’ve been watching this week, I no longer believe that to be the case. Also note that I will be using the term widget.com in place of the real site name I was looking at and the term “widget installation section” for the new picture heavy section we had launched. I’d use the real site, but some people seem determined to believe I’m still on the dark side. ;-)
So, I’m checking the indexing of widget.com and find that the new installation section has been indexed, along with five new main site pages we had put up – one four days prior and four the day before. The installation section, again, mainly consisting of pictures on each page is listed in supplemental as are all five of the new content pages.
Now, since supplemental has always acted keyword query specific, often times pages that showed supplemental in a site search would do fine in the main index – and that of course, is the only real concern. But, the only way I could get this page to show up was to do an exact search in quotes. And even though my page was the only listing for the sentence searched, it still had that nice “supplemental result” tag sitting next to it. The page was truly supplemental. A few more tests and sure enough, every page from the site that was listed as supplemental in a site query truly was supplemental in the search results.
My first thought of course is that Google had changed how it was showing supplemental in the results – it damn sure seemed to be a site specific query now. But, my bigger concern was how 14 brand new pages, five of which were of high quality, lengthy and conceptually unique (again, the others were quality as well, but contained little text, so I could see Google getting confused as to their value) were being labeled and treated as supplemental by Google.
I decided to think on it a bit and assigned the writer to transcribing the images into text for the installation guides. The next day, I get on the topic again with the Jason Calacanis whore – I am so getting my ass kicked for that one – and go to show him the issue with widgets.com. But, this time, there have been a few changes…
The first was that two of the installation guide pages had magically popped out of supplemental. Additionally, the content page that was launched several days before the other four had also escaped supplemental. For a “condition” often referred to as supplemental hell by webmasters because of the work that goes into escaping it. I found it a little odd that my pages, which had gone untouched in the interim, were escaping it on their own.
I start checking a few more sites that are continually having new pages added and am seeing the same issue. I’m seeing it on old pages as well, but I’m seeing it on ton of brand spanking new pages and that is what has my mind going. Mind you, the supplemental query on the older pages is also odd, because they’re full of great content.
So, that leaves me with several thoughts swirling in my head… and wondering if anyone else is seeing supplemental weirdness. I’m going to keep an eye on widgets.com over the next few days. I have a feeling I’ll be seeing more of those new pages escape supplemental without any intervening on my part. The older pages in supplemental from some of my other sites – well, I’ll be running some tests on those too.
About the Author
Rae Hoffman-Dolan aka "Sugarrae" is an affiliate marketing veteran and an (extremely) occasional Houston SEO consultant specializing in SEO audits and link building strategies. She is also the author of the often controversial Sugarrae blog and the SVP of Marketing for Speedy Incorporation Services. You can connect with Rae via Twitter and Facebook.
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Sugarrae runs on the Thesis WordPress Theme
If you’re someone who doesn’t understand a lot of PHP, Thesis will give a ton of functionality that you wouldn’t be able to obtain otherwise with a simple control panel instead of having to alter code. For the advanced, Thesis has incredible customization possibilities via Thesis hooks.
For those "in between", like myself, I’ve created "dummy" guides for Thesis hooks that allow us to make more professional customizations than we ever deemed possible. The theme is not only highly customizable, but it has allowed me to run Sugarrae more professionally, with a much more targeted focus on monetization than it ever has been able to achieve before. You can find out more about Thesis below:
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