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Google Supplemental Index Label Formally Dropped
August 01, 2007
Yesterday's announcement from Google's Official Webmaster Central Blog represents a formal declaration of what Matt Cutts hinted at in a recent SEOMoz post: The "Supplemental Result" label that used to appear for pages in Google's "junior varsity" index will no longer appear.
Do not mininterpret this as "Supplemental Result pages no longer exist." They still do, if you read the Google post with subtlety. The gist of it is that Google crawlers are now able to cruise through these pages with more frequency and reliability. This apparently negates the need for a special label, as while these two indexes are certainly not treated the same, the differences appear to be waning.
Personally, I don't really mind that this is disappearing, because even in the best cases, it wasn't always easy to determine if pages were "really" in it, and people seldom agreed on what caused pages to be there (despite several Googlers saying exactly what got you there). Still, the presence of Supplemental pages forced webmasters to figure out some better ways to organize their sites, which is the silver lining.
With a good analytics program, you have the capability of seeing how many pages on your site are performing well or not performing at all. Seeing them labeled as "Supplemental" was a shortcut to diagnosis, but its absence is hardly cause for panic.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at August 1, 2007 07:06 AM
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