Starting today, Google will be removing the “supplemental labels” on the URLs of supplemental results displayed by the search engine. Since 2003, the supplemental results has provided Google with a better way of displaying more search results when it crawls websites. Through the supplemental results, Google were able to provide more search results to users even though this results were not crawled from the main index of a website. These supplemental results usually came from other pages of the websites.
In 2006, Google have extensivly indexed as much as it can from other pages of web site aside from its main index page. And these are reflected in the growing number of supplemental results that Google shows to users. Since the difference between the main and supplemental results is getting narrower, Google decided to get rid of the label “supplemental results” as it display the URLS of those supplemental results, the reason apparently according to Google is to give more benefits to users.
There are two possible reactions to these announcement. One coming from the webmaster side would seem to be on a positive note. The more pages that Google indexes from their websites, the more chances of increasing traffic on their site. This is particularly true for “blog type websites” because the meat of their content is not found on the main index page but on the post pages.
But from the point of view of users, these may not be particularly useful and some may find it a waste of time clicking on the URLs of the supplemental results only to find out that those results are not that really relevant to their search query. Some users may not be aware that what they are about to click are just supplemental results from the main index of the website. Chances are those “uninformed” users may click each of those supplemental results but in the end not of these answer their queries.
Whether this decision to remove the supplemental results label would affect webmasters and Google search engine users is yet to be seen in the coming days.
In the meantime the official announcement through a post from the Google Webmaster Central Blog has generated various comments from webmasters and users combined. The reactions are varied and it would be worthwhile to watch for, which side will Google listen to.
Try
site:www.domain.com/&
You’ll see supplemental results.
I mean labels disappered, but you can see SR using that search queue.
That query does appear to report Supplemental Results pages but we have no way of knowing (based on current knowledge and technique) when the query may stop reporting accurate data.
Removing supplemental results will result in much less confusion. I don’t think the majority of the general public was aware of the SR, but it causes endless confusion for webmasters and SEO’s – few of whom actually understood what supplemental results actually were.
Thankfully, supplemental results are past tense.
@egorych: Thanks for the tip. I thought we also couldn’t see the Supplemental Results anymore now. However this seems to work :-)
I’m a little confused. Does this mean that worrying about getting listed in the supplemental index is now a thing of the past? Or does it simply mean we no longer have a way to evaluate if pages are not meeting the criteria to be considered a top page?
I personally found the supplemental category helpful in creating a quality page.
Someone enlighten me as to what this really means, please.
@10668844: There are still main and supplemental index. Now you simply can’t recognize a supplemental page in SERP. Google says this is because of a new indexing technique (you can read about it in google’s webmasters blog). May be in future there will be only one index, including supplemental.
@egorych: Thanks for posting. So in other words they are making things more difficult.
I tried using the site:www.XXXX.com/& command and pages that used to show up supplemental for me are no longer there.
I actually like the supplemental results to give webmasters a goal of working towards better SEO efforts. Now the search results are limited to per 1000 per site, so in essence, it is a downgrade.
Ya the supplemental results are gone that is okay but i just wonder now how to find out which pages is read by google frequently and which not. Should I have to check the cache of each page to find out is this page is okay or not.