• Register
• Log in

SEO Theory - SEO Theory and Analysis Blog

Algorithm analysis, Web community relationship analysis, SEO practices and techniques, industry news, etc.

• Home
• About SEO Theory
• SEO Glossary

Google Supplemental Results Questions and Answers

Posted by admin on February 17, 2007 in Supplemental Pages

This will be my last discussion of the Google Supplemental Results for a while, unless Google or one of its employees says something newsworthy in the near future. I need to move on to other topics.

Q: Do you share all your research about Google’s Supplemental Pages

No, although I’ve shared more research recently because pretty much everything I have summarized has been discussed by other people including several Google employees. The research details I don’t share chiefly consist of the tests and queries we use at work to analyze Google’s Supplemental Results.

Q: How reliable is your research?

People do question my ideas. But since I don’t publish the details of my research — and since I don’t share a great deal of research that may lead me to investigate ideas I do talk about openly, or which may elaborate on topics I’ve discussed in the past — you should assume that, regardless of how sound my arguments may seem, I am deliberately withholding information.

And I say easily that because I have always withheld information.

Still, I strive to provide credible sources of information for most of what I share. My conclusions are my own, although other people occasionally reach the same conclusions and share them.

Q: Do you have pages in Supplemental Results? And are you doing anything to change that?

Okay, that’s two questions in one. Yes, I have pages in the Supplemental Results. When your personal Web content extends to more than 100,000 pages, odds are pretty good that a significant portion of them are in the Supplemental Results Index at Google. I don’t have an accurate estimate of how much personal content I have that has “gone Supplemental”. I would guess something on the order of tens of thousands of pages.

Am I doing anything to change the Supplemental status of all those pages? Nope. I don’t have time to do so. Nor do I have the inclination. It is my hope that Google resolves whatever led them to effectively de-index up to 80% of the Web content they have found (note that I mean something different by “de-index” from “delist”). I have taken steps to ensure that the pages I feel are most important are parsed and indexed by Google (they do not appear as Supplemental Results). That is really all that is humanly possible, given that I have a full-time job working for other people.

Q: Is it possible to get 100,000 pages out of the Supplemental Results Index?

I’m not in a position to answer that exact question. Do I believe it can be done? In theory, sure, I believe it is possible. Do I believe anyone can do it? Not really. It would, in my opinion, take considerable resources.

Do I believe I could do it? Yes, but I would have to have complete control over the Web content and frankly, in my experience, people seem to prefer shooting themselves in both feet and disembowling themselves to handing over full control of their 100,000-page inventory to a stranger. After all, those 100,000 pages are your business, aren’t they?

Googlers like Adam Lasnik, Vanessa Fox, and Matt Cutts say “get more quality links” to move pages into the Main Index. In your opinion, what’s a “quality link”?

I wrote about that very topic for SEOmoz last year. Check out What’s in your link quality? at their blog. That’s my opinion of what constitute the best, most high value links you can get from other sites. Are there links you can get that are not quite as good that are still helpful? Most likely.

But I don’t share linking sources any more. I’ve learned the hard way that posting link source ideas on the Web hurts everyone. I roll my eyes every time I see some SEO guru provide a list of “good linking sources”. You can write off every link as spammed and possibly delisted in 4-8 months.

A high value link — one that will help you — is the kind of link that not everyone can get. EGOL, a popular SEO forum mod and (and occasional SEOmoz blogger) recently suggested in a forum that you write a really well-crafted link request message (or letter). Although I’ve often said I don’t like getting such requests, a few do get through my filters and I do occasionally respond.

Just this week, I received a personal plea for help from someone with an on-topic collection of auction links supposedly intended to benefit a worthy charity. Unfortunately, when I tried to check out the story, the people I needed to hear back from were slow to respond. Technically, I’m still waiting. If you want someone like me to give you a link, make yourself available until the deal is done. I am prepared to do a lot more than just give a link to the right people.

Include phone numbers because if you pique my interest, I won’t have much time to think about helping you. Tell me when and how to contact you. Do that for everyone whom you think can really help your worthy charity.

Q: Why do other SEOs tell people to make their content unique?

If you have duplicate content it should be going into the Supplemental Results Index, in my opinion. However, today’s SRI is different from the one we were dealing with over a year ago. The Bigdaddy SRI is not a dumping ground for duplicate content like the old, pre-Bigdaddy SRI was. If your pages are going Supplemental, the odds now favor your content being relatively unique and easily distinguishable from the rest of the Web.

The SEOs who are playing the “make sure your content is unique” card are out of tune with reality. In fact, I believe some of them have mistaken Google’s “In order to show you the most relevant results, we have omitted some entries very similar to the 24 already displayed” message as an indication of Supplemental Results. Although Supplemental Results pages can certainly be omitted like this, more often than not I am finding many Main Index pages being omitted.

The omissions do appear to be tied to duplicate title elements and meta description tags, for what it’s worth. So in many cases you can probably eliminate or reduce the number of queries where your pages are omitted from search results by ensuring their meta data is unique. But this issue is completely unrelated to the Supplemental Results issue.

Q: Will it help if I save my PageRank? Should I not be linking to other sites?

It’s unbelievabe how many SEO blogs and forums continue to write about the Toolbar PR values as if they have some use or value with respect to obtaining specific search results. And it’s just sad and professionally embarrassing that people in this industry talk about “bleeding” or “leaking” or “losing” PageRank. Frankly, I link out to many other sites without their ever asking me for links. My pages don’t suffer because of outbound links. In fact, I know that most of the pages I have in the Supplemental Results Index do not link out to other domains.

And most of the pages I have in the Main Web Index do link out to other domains without regard for reciprocation. Personally, I just don’t believe there is any reason for people to be concerned about “hoarding PageRank”. It’s not like Google really uses PageRank to determine most query results. Pages that accrue PageRank benefit from it in some fashion — but Google is most interested in relevance, and PageRank is not an indicator of relevance.

If you don’t want to link out to other sites, then don’t do that. I think that hurts you far more than linking ever could — although it depends on how you link out. If you’re exchanging links with people who run Google or Yahoo! ads on their pages, you probably deserve to lose your rankings. And, yes, I have ads on most of my personal pages. So you shouldn’t be exchanging links with me, either.

All that said, Internal PageRank (not the number reported in the Google Toolbar) does appear to be the distinguishing factor. At least, the Googlers have pretty much indicated that. Now, how do you measure internal PageRank? I’ve never seen anyone make a reasonable case for using the Toolbar PR as a measurement of internal PageRank. There are a lot of PR 5 pages that have gone Supplemental. I have PR 0 pages that are in the Main Index.

See the disconnect between the Toolbar and Supplemental Results?

Q: How much will the new Webmaster Central link reporting tool help me?

That depends on what you do with the data. Matt Cutts has warned people that the data is incomplete and that it includes links that don’t pass value. I can still get some useful information from the reported linking, but I don’t know which links pass the best value and I wouldn’t trust any SEO who says he can figure that out any farther than I can throw him.

If you want to be a Master of Links in the Ninth Circle of Search Engine Optimization, you need to master a few basic rules. I’ll close out the Q-and-A with a small selection of those rules.

The Fundamental Principles of Links and Search Engine Optimization

1. It’s not all about links.
2. The only way to know if a link passes value is if you use it to pass unique anchor text.
3. One search engine’s idea of value may differ from another.
4. There is no such thing as an undetectable link.
5. Links done properly do far more than just pass PageRank and anchor text.
6. The only useless link is the link no one ever sees.
7. Variety is the spice of links.
8. No link lasts forever.
9. The best links last a very long time.
10. You cannot use one search engine to research your backlinks in another search engine.
11. You must use more than one search engine to find the largest possible number of backlinks.
12. Knowing who links to you is pretty much useless, worthless information.
13. Understanding why any given site links to your content is worth more than all the inventory in every link brokerage service.
14. You cannot judge the quality of a site by how many backlinks it has.
15. You can and should develop your own quality measurements for links that do not rely upon Toolbar PageRank and numbers of links.
16. The most relevant links do not necessarily come from pages with similar topics as your own.
17. Understanding that relevance goes well beyond which words are associated with a page puts you a mile ahead of link-mongering SEOs.
18. The top-level domain of a linking page does not matter (stop drooling after .GOV and .EDU links).
19. I will never tell you everything I have learned about linking.
20. You learn by doing, not by reading blogs and forums, because doing helps you understand how things can seem to work.
21. Always assume that your conclusions about why anything happens are wrong.
22. Experiment, evaluate, adjust.
23. It’s not all about links.