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Supplemental Index, We Hardly Knew Ye
December 19, 2007
The Google Webmaster Central Blog put another nail (the final one?) in the coffin of Google's infamous Supplemental Index just now by declaring it fully immersed into the main index:
We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in, and once these "supplementalization effects" were gone, the "supplemental result" tag itself -- which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect -- was eliminated a few months ago. Now we're coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we're now searching the whole index for every query.
This is, in my opinion, much more significant than the prior act of simply removing the "Supplemental Index" label. The main problem has never been the label applied (or not applied) to URLs, but the fact (or at least the fear) that SI pages were being given short shrift in their efforts to contend for queries. So what's the intended result?
From a user perspective, this means that you'll be seeing more relevant documents and a much deeper slice of the web, especially for non-English queries. For webmasters, this means that good-quality pages that were less visible in our index are more likely to come up for queries.
Of course the onus doesn't fall entirely on Google here. SI pages were SI for a reason. If you think they're worth ranking for, the old rules still apply. Make sure you remove any obstacles to crawling and indexing that may remain, and try to get some additional links -- internal and external -- pointing to them.
see all posts by Erik Dafforn
posted by Erik Dafforn at December 19, 2007 12:29 PM
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Comments
Thank you for the insightful information on "supplemental index" label. We learned something of value from your article.
Happy Holidays!
Posted by: HealthCareers at December 21, 2007 03:09 PM
I think they should stick to that coz it's a lot better to obtain quality results from the web. BTW, thanks for posting this article
Posted by: SEO Solutions at January 16, 2008 03:42 PM