An SEO Guide To Google’s Supplemental Results
Google’s supplemental results are a pretty much unknown variable in the SEO process. There aren’t too many articles on this topic, although a second look will reveal its high sensitivity and importance. Quiet often, understanding how Google creates these supplemental pages is beneficial in the effort of raising the SERPs (search engine ranking position).
If we were to stick with the explanation offered by Google we will not get very far. The first article is a very basic explanation aimed for the common users and it sounds like this:
“Google augments results for difficult queries by searching a supplemental collection of web pages. Results from this index are marked in green as “Supplemental.” “
The second reference is more complex, it is aimed at webmasters and can be found here
As you will soon notice, this explanation although more detailed is still not enough. There are some things we can learn from this limited resources though:
- The occurence of supplemental results is favoured by complex searches
- There are at least two separate indexes: a main one and a supplemental one. Depending on terms searched they are criteria to move a page from one index to another.
- The process of sending a page in one of the two indexes is completely automated.
- PageRank is not affected in absolutely any manner.
Not quite groundbreaking, but still rather useful. From this point on, we let Google alone and concentrate on empirical results:
Observations:
1) One of the most obvious causes responsible for the appearance of these supplemental results is the inconsistency of the www prefix in the URL’s and because Google indexes URL’s and not webpages it is quite normal that a variant will be put in the main index (usually the one containing www), while the second one will go in the supplemental index. This can be checked rather easily as the two distinct entries will show up as being indexed at different times (check the cached version). Why is this important? Because the PageRank is divided among the two URL’s. This is why it is recommended to edit the htaccess.txt file in the root section of your website (or create one from scratch if there isn’t any) and add the following code:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^yourdomain.com [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.yourdomain.com/$1 [L,R=301]
where yourdomain is the name of your domain.
2)Another obvious cause for supplemental results generation is the existence of 401 errors. Google archives and caches pages for a very long time and if some of your pages have been removed or renamed, the results in Google will still appear. This is rather easily fixed, simply create pages for all the indexed pages or if that is not possible create a htaccess redirect to another page to avoid PageRank loss.
3)Page updating. If you change the content of a page, when Google will spider it will create a supplemental entry for the old one. This works even for minor updates. Obviously this is teh sort of supplemental results you want, especially if it happens to somebody else’s site which by accident contains a backlink to your own.
4)Another instance of supplemental results generation occurs when Google perceives a page as having a duplicate content. With websites containing a very low text to code ratio this can be improved by supplying unique keyword and description metatags for each site. Obviously using unique content for each page might help too.
5)The supplemental results can also be created by the dynamic page generation process. If twop pages have a very similar URL, the search engine will consider one of them as a duplicate and place it in the supplemental results index. By choosing a more SEO friendly development platform , you can easily bypass this issue.
6)Orphaned pages or pages that are placed in too much depth can also be placed in the supplemental results index. To avoid this, you must increase the internal linking ratio.
In a future post I will detail more how to detect exactly the number of supplemental results your site has and also expand on the topic covered only briefly in point 5. Stay tuned.
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