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Google’s supplemental index is still biting your ass

Posted by Michael Martinez on January 30, 2008 in Seo Myths

The latest myth sweeping across the SEO community is that Google’s Supplemental Results Index no longer matters — in fact, many people are even saying it no longer exists, that it was merged with Google’s main index.

Of course, many people in the SEO community wrongly believe that the old “site:domain -gobbledy gook” method no longer works. As I pointed out last year, it never worked in the first place. It gave you false positive results so a lot of SEOs wrongly believed they knew how many of their pages were in the Supplemental Results Index.

Matt Cutts says (in the interview transcript I just linked to above) that “I think there are one or two sort of undocumented ways, but we do not really talk about them. We are not on a quest to close down every single one that we know of. It is more like: whenever that happens, it is a bug to have our supplemental index treated very differently from the main index.”

Okay, hold the horses!

Did Matt Cutts really say that “it is a bug to have our supplemental index treated very differently from the main index”? Yeah, so we’re told he did.

Of course, from Google’s perspective, treating the Supplemental Results Index differently from the Main Web Index is a daily occurrence. No, make that a minutely occurrence. It is intentional on Google’s part that Main Web Index pages be ranked above Supplemental Results pages regardless of how much more relevant to the query the Supplemental pages are.

But that’s not the only way Google differentiates between Supplemental Pages and Main Web Index pages. Here are a few other distinctions they don’t discuss publicly:

1. Supplemental pages rarely if ever pass link anchor text
2. Link anchor text from Main Web Index pages performs better than link anchor text from Supplemental pages
3. Supplemental pages still do not show up for unique expressions in site searches unless the expressions use rare words
4. Supplemental pages do not appear in all query variations
5. Supplemental pages are not refreshed in Google’s cache as often as Main Web Index pages

I could go on, but that list should suffice for now. You can easily check these things for yourselves (if you know how to use search engines). You can still determine which of your pages are in the Supplemental Results index through a variety of tests. While you cannot be 100% certain your conclusions are right, you can be pretty damn sure a page is Supplemental if it doesn’t appear in a site search but you find that Google has cached it with an info query.

You’re not gaining search visibility through the Supplemental Results Index. A few years ago that was actually true. Supplemental Pages did once rank well in long-tail searches, but since Google is still not indexing every word on the Supplemental pages and since Google continues to show Main Web Index pages first, you’re screwed for every page you have in the Supplemental Results Index.

Which means that Google’s claim that Supplemental goes mainstream is utter nonsense. They were completely misleading the public with that post in a clear and obvious PR spin. Deliberately not telling you the whole story.

And the SEO community in general has taken the bait, hook, line, and sinker.

You drank the poisened sweet juice, dudes.

You walked down the golden path to Supplemental Hell, only you were silenced by the bald-faced manipulations in Google’s blatantly spin-doctoring post.

The Supplemental Results Index is still very much in existence, still very much enforcing Google’s Web Apartheid, and still very much making life difficult for small Web site operators who cannot possibly accumulate, attract, or construct the PageRank they need to rank well for relatively uncompetitive queries to which their sites are more relevant than the spammers’ sites (who basically just build PageRank through volume), the large commercial sites (who basically just build PageRank through volume), the huge forum communities (who basically just build PageRank through volume), and other large content sites (who basically just build PageRank through volume).

I wish — I truly, sincerely, honestly WISH — that I could help people who are struggling for legitimate search visibility in Google’s cheesy, low-quality search results by sharing some ideas for how to build their internal PageRank.

But I can’t. I mean, what can you do when Google tells you that “Supplemental Goes Mainstream” and every SEO on the Web believes that load of horse puckey?

We’re doomed because we have no options for fair and relevant search results.

Geeze, I wish there was another search engine out there that we could use. Google just absolutely stinks to high heaven. Who in their right mind, knowing that Google deliberately shows you bad, less relevant results, would want to use Google as a search resource?

We all might as well lay down and die, do nothing, and give it up. The SEO community is powerless to stand up to the mighty behemoth and say, “Enough with your paid links crap! GIVE US RELEVANT SEARCH RESULTS FOR A FREAKING CHANGE!”

2008 is the Year of Irrelevant Optimization.

Yes, folks, you heard it here, first. This year we shall all learn to optimize for irrelevance. Clearly, that is the only way to get anything useful and valuable seen in Google’s search results.

Unless you’re a spammer.