Google Supplemental Index

[Chris]

I just noticed today that one of my sites has been sent to Google's supplemental index. Last I paid any attention to this site was May so this move must be relatively recent.

I had great rankings, such as #1 for Madonna of the Rocks. The site has 18 DMOZ listings and is listed in Yahoo. It has been around since I think 2001 and so has established many other incoming links.

The content is public domain, and so is published elsewhere, but my site has more PR than the other sites and there are only 2 or 3 other sites publishing it.

[KLB]

What does it mean to be moved to Google's "supplemental index"?

[Chris]

Its about as bad as being banned. Google knows about your site but doesn't list you in SERPs until the end.

[KLB]

Oh, that sucks.

[asphalt]

How do you tell if your site is in the supplemental index?


Edit:
Nevermind I re read your post, I guess just listed at the end of the results

[Chris]

It'll say "Supplemental Result" next to all listings when doing a site:www.yourdomain.com search

for instance:

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&rls=GGLD,GGLD:2004-44,GGLD:en&q=site%3Awww%2Eartist%2Dbiography%2Einfo

[jonnyhilfiger]

You're not alone, check out DP Forums and you'll see there's shed loads of people complaining (myself included) about sites being de-indexed from google and then pages turning up again as supplemental results.

My longest serving site is suffereing exactly the same problem since March 8th, traffic down 50 -60% as a result.

John

[Cutter]

From what I've read about supplemental results it has a lot to do with duplicate content, both from other sites and within your own site. An example was if you have a page where a sentence are paragraph is the only unique thing, with the rest of the content (I would guess navigation and headers) being the same.

[Masetek]

Here is a post from Jim Boykin regarding the supplemental index

http://www.jimboykin.com/damned-to-google-hell-supplemental-results/

That sucks Chris, I'm surprised that suck an old site got dropped in.

[Chris]

I know, it makes me worried about my other sites. This site had high rankings, good pagerank, nice quality incoming links.

[chromate]

The content is public domain, and so is published elsewhere

I'm pretty sure that's your answer. I was reading a post on Matt Cutt's blog and duplicate content filters seem to be a major part of that last Google update. Loads of people using shared articles have ended up in the supplemental index.

[Chris]

Yes but it doesn't make a lot of sense.

For one, of all the sites publishing it this site has the highest PR. This site also has a large number of incoming links, good quality ones.

For two, compared with other public domain content, this content is hardly published at all.

For three, none of my other sites with public domain content have been hit.

[chromate]

...doesn't make a lot of sense.

That's been Google all-over for years now. Change after change and things seem to get worse and worse. :(

I too would think that your site should have remained and any other duplicates should have bitten the dust, mainly due to the number of quality links you have acquired. Do you have any unique content on the site in addition to the duplicated stuff? If not, perhaps it's something to do with that.

Aside from that, I have no idea. I don't even bother following google much anymore for the very reason that I often just can't find logical explinations for stuff.

[Chris]

Yes, there are like 1200 user comments which are unique.

Too bad Matt Cutts is on vacation....

[KelliShaver]

Ouch, Chris, that really sucks. Can you work your way back otu of the supplemental index?

[Chris]

I hope so.

[davesplace1]

Google is a strange search engine. My sites dispear from their SERPs all the time, they a couple of months later they show back up. I can allways tell when out of the blue one of my sites traffic doubles when Google reindexs it :). MSN and Yahoo seem to have more stable SERPs but not as much traffic as Google. It does make being a webmaster intresting.

[KLB]

The thing that really drives me nuts about things like this is that things like Chris's site is getting punished while mountains of subdomain sites are scraping the Internet and flooding search results. Google has got to do a better job of dealing with scraper sites and they need to start treating subdomains as if they are subfolders of a site. I track backlinks to my sites, references to my sites and copying of my content via Copyscape and Google Alert and I am stunned at the at the rate at which subdomains and scraper sites are proliferating.

Even without getting pushed to the supplemental index, having to compete against all of this subdomain spamming is really tough.

[agua]

Chris - you seem to be out of the Supplemental Index - how did you do that?

[Chris]

Not fully out, but mostly out.

What I did:

1. Redesign the site, and am working on editing all the content.
2. Add Google sitemap.

I figure if anything it was duplicate content that put me int here so by changing things up I fixed it.

[agua]

Thanks Chris :)

[Mike]

This thread has just told me why I'm not getting anywhere in google with one or two sites. I've just checked a few and nearly every page is a supplemental result. The thing that annoys me though is on both sides, ALL content is unique. I either wrote it, or I paid someone else to. The content is not on any other sites, just mine.

Does anyone know other reasons why google lists pages as supplemental?

[Chris]

Too low of a pagerank. Too obscure.

[Mike]

The thing is, before the last update all my sub pages had about a PR3 (some may have been 4), and my homepage was a 4. Then, after the update, my homepage was the only page left with pagerank. I don't know if I've been banned or what.

[A.N.Onym]

You get into the supplemental index if you have too few unique content on a page. Use unique titles, meta tags, headings, subheadings, a couple of paragraphs of unique text and you'll be fine, provided your navigation (top, left, right, footer) isn't more than 70% (wild guess) of the content.

The fact that you paid someone write the content for you doesn't mean its not published elsewhere. The person may be rewording another article (semi-duplicate) or someone else may be scraping your site.

[KLB]

The fact that you paid someone write the content for you doesn't mean its not published elsewhere. The person may be rewording another article (semi-duplicate) or someone else may be scraping your site.
Using tools like http://copyscape.com can be very useful at finding out if an article is original before buying it and after publishing an article Copyscape can be very useful at tracking down and terminating pages that steal the article.

[Mike]

No, I checked when I bought the articles if they were published elsewhere. The titles just describe what a page is about. Eg, if it was about Mitsubishi cars, the title would be "Mitsubishi" etc.

[overload]

here it is what Matt Cutts has to say about supplemental results:

http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3494613828170903728