Look how old this is! I post at SearchCommander.com now, and this post was published 18 years 4 months 3 days ago. This industry changes FAST, so blindly following the advice here *may not* be a good idea! If you're at all unsure, feel free to hit me up on Twitter and ask.
Nothing, now!
I just tried to send someone to Google’s own definition of Supplemental Results, and find that all references to them have been removed from Google’s help files. Why would that be?
Looking at Google’s cache of their own site, I see that until recently, they said this:
What’s a “supplemental result?”
A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it’s pulled from our supplemental index. We’re able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.If you’re a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there’s no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn’t affect its PageRank. For tips on maintaining a crawler-friendly site, please visit our Google’s Webmaster Guidelines
Why do you suppose they would remove it?
This is the URL that the information was on before, and the one that comes up in the results pages…
www.google.com/support/bin/answer.py?answer=12286
That’s a really good question. I would suggesting posting this to Matt Cutt’s blog under this posting:
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/more-seo-answers-on-video/
(See Session 6)
Yes, I did post this on Matt Cutts blog last Friday, but it has yet gone unanswered.
I was hoping he’d mention it in the videos he made. Meanwhile, Supplemental results are coming back that have been dead for months. People are being beaten up over this, clients and SEO’s alike!
Ahh – Here it is – A video from Matt all about Supplemental Results – maybe he’ll answer there…
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3494613828170903728
Nope – he didn’t answer directly, but the video is worth a watch. The supplemental results are changing a lot this summer, and along with the criteria, i suspect that the help files are too. They’re likely fixing it
Update –
Google now addresses Supplemental Results again…
Google Definition of Supplemental results,
The internet is filled with people wondering why their websites got dumped into the supplemental results…
I’m wondering why Google’s references to them completely disappeared. How mysterious 😉