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Why you now have Supplemental Results pages on Google

Posted by admin on January 3, 2007 in SEO Theory, Supplemental Pages

For more than a month now Webmasters around the world have been seeking answers with increasing frustration and alarm. Google has apparently been busy recrawling the Web, but as it recrawls the Web many pages leave the Main Index and pass quietly into the Supplemental Index.

Whether that should be a cause for concern is a separate issue. Let it suffice to say that many people are concerned and they have not been satisfied with responses from Google.

I think that today marks the day Google has come out and conceded that, yes, something changed. When the change was implemented is not relevant, in my opinion. We can be reasonably assured that confirmation has been extended.

As so many bloggers have done over the New Years’ weekend, Matt Cutts shared his 2006 Web statistics for people to ponder. In the comments on Matt’s post I opportunistically noted that the largest peaks in traffic coincided with the Bigdaddy launch of January 2006 - March 2006 and the most recent “it’s just a Data Refresh” update-like-behavior in Google’s search results that I previously suggested was an update which began the weekend of November 18/19.

Matt’s first response was to point to a comment he had previously made, in which he wrote: “I believe that a data refresh which used to be every 3-4 weeks is now happening more like every day. So the changes in ranking that some people were seeing on the 17th or 27th during the summer months can now happen every day.”

The possible significance of the remark was not lost on me. It does sound like Google is aggressively recrawling the Web unlike ever before. And if that is the case, I say, “It’s about time, Google!” Of course, I’m not seeing much evidence of active recrawling on many poorly linked sites I monitor. I am seeing aggressive crawling on some well-linked sites.

However, Matt has made other remarks about being on the fringe of the crawl. What is the “fringe of the crawl”? I will speculate that as Google does a sweep of the Web, sites that have very few links pointing to them will see radical changes because their supporting links will occasionally drop out of the Main Index.

Matt actually wrote in that post: “Some folks that were doing a lot of reciprocal links might see less crawling. If your site has very few links where you’d be on the fringe of the crawl, then it’s relatively normal that changes in the crawl may change how much of your site we crawl. And if you’ve got an affiliate site, it makes sense to think about the amount of value-add that your site provides; you want to provide a reason why users would prefer your site.” (Emphasis is mine)

So let’s come back to Matt’s 2006 statistics post. I’ve spent the past few days scouring the Webmaster Central Help group. I’m not very popular there right now as I was doing my best to shoot down SEO myths that have taken firm hold among the regulars (the people most actively involved in assisting frustrated Webmasters). The signal-to-noise ratio in the group is very low because a few well-meaning regular posters are sharing some very bizarre advice that is completely out of step with what Googlers (Matt in particular) have been saying about this “It’s not really an update” thing.

Like so many other people, I feel compelled to speak up and say something when I think I know the solution to a nattering problem. So I cannot fault the good-hearted souls who want to see other people succeed. But there were simply too many references to Toolbar PR, checking backlinks on various SEO tools, using Yahoo! Site Explorer — well, those of you who know my work in SEO understand how I just had to say something.

But me saying something is no different from anyone else saying something. We can all speak our minds, share our opinions, and generally just make the muddy waters of my-pages-have-gone-supplemental even murkier. In short, I was adding to the noise.

But the spikes in Matt’s blog traffic were very strong signals, so I decided to press the issue and leave Matt absolutely no room to simply reiterate what he has already said: that it’s just a daily data refresh. So I conceded that we’re seeing the results of a daily data refresh — no point in arguing with someone who has never been caught in a lie by the SEO community.

Nonetheless, “daily data refresh” doesn’t answer the two questions so many people have been asking:

Why did my site suddenly disappear from Google?

Why are my pages suddenly showing as Supplemental Results in Google?

You name the forum, I have probably seen these questions asked there over the past five weeks. Blogs discuss this. I’m sure there are many emails flying around the Web. I suspect many SEOs have unhappy customers who want to know what happened.

So what did Matt say?

…I can try to talk more about things like supplemental more. Usually it’s not because I’m trying to sidestep, but because I’ve said the high-order bits already. For example, the main thing that determines presence in the supplemental index is PageRank. Not enough links for a page to make it into the regular web index? Then it’s likely to be an issue of not enough PageRank to that page. The page used to do well and now it’s in the supplemental results? It could be that links that previously counted aren’t as trusted anymore. For example, if someone’s doing a co-op link exchange, or buying links, or reciprocal linking to excess, that’s the sort of thing where those links might not be counting as much as they used to.

All emphasis is mine.

As one of the people who is unhappy with my recent participation in the Google Webmaster Central forum has been quick to point out, Matt made an issue of PageRank. I was trying to explain to one of his compadres that Toolbar PageRank is worthless for SEO evaluation. Matt is usually very careful to refer to “Toolbar PageRank” as “external PageRank”, a point he clarified for me earlier this year.

Now, I’m sure someone will want to argue that Matt may have neglected to say “external PageRank” in the comment I just cited, but frankly I don’t think so. Of course, if Matt makes a retraction, I’ll be glad to correct myself and concede that Google does base what it does on Toolbar PR after all. This would be the first time in Google’s history, however, that they ever made such an admission.

In any event, I’ve been suggesting to people for quite some time now that they need to get non-Supplemental links in order to move pages out of Supplemental status. It appears to me that Matt’s more definitive explanation of what has been happenning the past few weeks substantiates what I’ve been saying.

Of course, Matt is being careful not to divulge anything he hasn’t actually said before. It’s not like I make up stuff and attribute it to Matt or anyone else at the search engines. I carefully scour as many reliable sources of information as I can find and I try to put the pieces of the puzzle together. Sometimes I’m wrong. This time I was right or close to right.

Matt has warned people repeatedly not to buy links (for the purpose of inflating PageRank), not to engage in excessive reciprocal trading, and he has pointed out on more than one occasion that Google moves to devalue links that it deems to be manipulative. All I’ve done is summarize what Matt has repeatedly said.

But now Matt has reiterated those points and made it clear that Google has actually taken a further step down that road, without saying they have. That is, he has confirmed that they are coming down hard on suspicious links, stripping them of their ability to confer value. It doesn’t matter when Google started doing this. What matters is that this is what Google says it’s doing.

And based on the link profiles I’ve compiled for dozens of Web sites over the past few weeks, I am convinced that the sites being slammed by these “daily data refreshes” are mostly relying upon cheap, easy-to-get links that match the low-quality profile Google has been warning people about.

You don’t need to go barging into online discussion groups asking why Google has suddenly singled out your site for SERPs execution. You haven’t been singled out, you’re being included in the massive housecleaning that Google has been warning people for many months was coming.

I don’t know if they will relent. I’ll be honest and admit that some of the sites over which I watch have been struck down, too. Careful experimentation has shown me that I can indeed move the Supplemental Pages back into the Main Index. But it’s a tedious, time-consuming process. I am guessing that the major targets of this “daily data refresh” process are not guys like me who need to launch new unique content sites.

You and I are just collateral damage. But Matt, Adam Lasnik, and Vanessa Fox have all now told people several times how to fix the problem: get more (value-passing) links. Trusted links.

And for the angry people in the Google Webmaster Central discussion groups: I’m done. I have no need to visit your community again.

Until the next time I want to find a large number of complaining Webmasters, that is. In the meantime, good luck telling them to fix their W3C validation and to look for their Google backlinks on Yahoo!