Google is indexing more pages now then ever before, but that’s not always a good thing. Sometimes these pages get sent to the supplemental index instead of the main index. It’s perfectly normal for most sites to have some pages in the supplemental index, but if your main pages (and especially your home page) get sent to the supplemental index you’ll likely not see much traffic from Google any more.
My site’s listed in the supplemental results, what does that mean?
As Google states, “Supplemental sites are part of Google’s auxiliary index.” Google will always show results from their main index before showing results from the supplemental index. This means that supplemental pages will almost never show up for searches, and will only show up for super specialized searches if few or no results come from the main index. With so many blogs and tag pages out there, even crazy many-word searches will bring back at least a few non-supplemental results.
How did my site get in the supplemental index?
One way pages end up in the supplemental index instead of the main index is a lack of PageRank (PR). This could be because you orphaned the page (no links pointing to it), the page lies too many clicks away from your home page, or your home page itself has a very low PR. If this is the case, you should work on your link building to those important pages of your site and build up their PageRank.
The other way your pages end up in the supplemental index is by having duplicate content on your page. This could be because you used the same manufacturer written product description that dozens of other sites use, you copied content from another website, or your pages have very little content and too much template which is duplicated on all pages. If this is the case, try writing unique content or changing your template so it doesn’t have the same elements on every page.
I changed my pages, what’s next?
Now that you’ve fixed your pages, it can be a long and hard process for getting them out of the supplemental index because the supplemental spider doesn’t come along very often. You should create or edit your Google sitemap XML file and hope that will be enough. If that doesn’t work, try changing the name (URL) of those pages and delete the old file.
Feel free to add your own observations about supplemental results here, we’d love to hear your stories.
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The duplicate content issue is what keeps me awake at night. Since WordPress creates many URLs to reach the same contents I used to think that I get penalized.
Though there are some who say that it is only a penalty when you have contents duplicated outside the domain. What do you think ?
Hello WordPress Guru,
That is a problem many blogs face.
I’ve seen some large blogs with 90% of their indexed pages be in the supplemental results index. There used to be a method for easily checking your supplemental pages vs. main indexed pages in Google, but Google seems to have stopped that functionality.
A site search on your domain shows 44 pages indexed & by my count 15 of those are in the supplemental index. That’s a pretty good ratio.
If you delete the old pages and rename them, should you 301/302 them for those who do happen to stumble onto them? Or would that just keep them stuck in the supl. ??
Using a 301 permanent redirect is this safe and wise choice here. Sometimes you can do a 302 in the beginning and the change to a 301 after the new page gains popularity, but I’d just do the 301 and move on.
I had a bunch of pages in the supplemental index and assumed it was due to WordPress’ structure. I created a good robots.txt, optimized titles, created 301 redirects. Slowly – slowly – google began properly excluding pages in accordance with the robots.txt file – but still, several weeks later, my supplemental count is horrible – sometimes 90%. I guess it just takes a really long time to shake them out.
I can give you tip that I did for a pet site of mine, Smoothie Recipes. I had the same problem, about 95% of my pages were supplemental. I did three specific steps which helped dramatically. I have over 300 recipes on the site, but I have almost 100 pages in the normal index, a huge increase. Here are the tasks I did which I think really helped: I started pointing links to some interior pages (recipes) by using a random post plugin. It places random post links on every page. I created a most popular blog post page, such is on this site as well if you look in the top nav. This also creates nice links to old posts and helps show visitors what is popular. And finally I made sure all my pages have a different meta description. Try these tactics and let me know how it works for you. Good luck!