The Death of the Google Supplemental tag and what this means to us all

Those website owners who've done a bit of research will know that they can see if the existence of their pages has been acknowledged by Google, i.e. that they are in the Google index.

What puzzles many is that they can see that their pages are there, but for all but a few very terms (these more often than not including the company name) the site never shows in the normal results.

The reasons this happens are many, and for a totally non technical view on this please see my other blog "Why aren't my pages on the first page of Google".

This blog is all about the removal of the "Supplemental" tag by Google and what this means to all website owners (as well as us SEO types).

The Supplemental Tag

The supplemental tag was used by Google to indicate that a page was thought to be not very "interesting" . Pages thus marked stood little chance of being displayed in the Search Results for any term. Indeed the very existence of this tag may be news to many.

However, as those "in the know" know, the supplemental tag was a very useful guide to the "Google Health" of a site, and better still it was easy to check. All you did was to type in site:www.mysite.com into the Google Search box and all the pages that Google has in it's index are shown.

What Used to Happen

What used to happen was that Google would then show all the pages for the site in it's index, labelling those that it thought "uninteresting" with the term "Supplemental Result". This in essence meant the page was thought to contain data that was not good enough, it being either too much "like" other pages on the site, not containing enough in the first place, or not being linked to enough by it's own site (and thus deemed not important by the site itself).

The above of course meant that the wise site owner could make the changes required and get his pages moved to the normal index and thus have a chance of being displayed for a relevant search term (something that as I say, is not likely to happen to pages in the Supplemental index).

So What Can You Do Know?

The change that Google have made (and I think it is a pretty poor move myself) means that other, more long winded and less accurate methods have to be carried out in order that a website owner can see which pages need attention.

The easiest of these is to check the cache date of each page when you do the site:www.mysite.com check. The "Cached" link can be found underneath each listing, and clicking this tell you when the page was last spidered. Basically if this date is more than a month old that page is "probably" not deemed important by Google. You'll then have to decide if that page is important to you and if it is, then you'll have to take action.

What Action to Take

So what action can you take to move your pages from the Supplemental index, if you think the pages are in it??

• Make sure that you have not duplicated the page somewhere
  
• Make the words on the pages (that the spider sees) are more unique
  
• Make sure that you have at least 250 words on the page
  
• Don't have too many ?this=that&abc=dogs&cge=cats in the URL (two = is OK, more is bad news)
  
• Get some links to that page from inside the site (internal links) and better still get a link from an external site to that page.
  
  Not as Easy as it Was
  
  So I'm afraid that Google has made our lives more difficult, but at least now that you have read this, you know the score and can do something about it if you wish…
  
  
  
  Graham Baylis
  Internet Marketing and Promotion Specialists
  www.I-O-M.com
  "Making sure your needle is found in the Internet Haystack"