Disclaimer: The following post is my own personal opinion and does not necessarily reflect the views of my employer or anyone else.
So I was checking out the latest Google Webmaster Central blog post and I found this bit of hyperbole:
The supplemental index
The “supplemental index” was a big topic of conversation in 2007, and it seems some webmasters are still worried about it. Instead of worrying, point your browser to this post on how we now search our entire index for every query.
That is SO cheap and low.
Googlers, your Supplemental Index remains a HUGE problem for Webmasters BECAUSE YOU INSIST ON SHOWING LESS RELEVANT MAIN WEB INDEX RESULTS FIRST.
Which part of “SHOW US THE MOST RELEVANT RESULTS FIRST” do Googlers not understand?
Linking to your brazenly misleading December post about the Supplemental Index does not change the fact that Google searchers cannot see the most relevant results first.
The appropriate action for Google to take on this matter is to STOP PENALIZING SUPPLEMENTAL RESULTS PAGES IN THE SEARCH RESULTS.
All you have to do, Google, is SHOW THE MOST RELEVANT RESULTS FIRST.
Stop telling people they don’t have to worry about the Supplemental Index.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
incrediblehelp 02.27.08 at 8:17 pm
We can only wish they would….
Halfdeck 03.06.08 at 7:48 am
“The appropriate action for Google to take on this matter is to STOP PENALIZING SUPPLEMENTAL RESULTS PAGES IN THE SEARCH RESULTS.”
That would be nice, except then you make the SERPS more vulnerable to spam. It’d be a piece of cake to inject Google with hundreds of thousands of pages that doesn’t have enough backlinks to make it into the main index, but have just enough juice to get crawled and indexed. When Google treats links on those pages like links on main index pages, you can dominate the SERPs by just exploiting internal anchor text and deep index penetration.
It has nothing to do with supp links lacking PageRank either. I have a site that went from 2,000 visits/day to 100/day because 99% of the site moved into the supplemental index. I don’t believe the site’s backlinks were drastically devalued, which tells me Google treats supp links like a two-headed stepchild. Even if words and phrases on supplemental pages are being fully indexed now, if the links on those pages aren’t treated seriously, they’re still going to have problems ranking.
Michael Martinez 03.06.08 at 8:48 am
Halfdeck: “That would be nice, except then you make the SERPS more vulnerable to spam.”
Michael: Half, I assure you, the spam is already in the Main Web Index. It’s doing just fine.
As far as Supplemental Links passing value, they don’t. Without the value of those links, SEO campaigns that depend on link anchor text don’t work.
So people are being stung both ways: their Supplemental pages are shown AFTER less relevant Main Web Index pages AND the links on their Supplemental pages are not passing anchor text.
In the meantime, spammers have already figured out how to get around this obstacle.
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