What Happened to the Supplemental Index (aka Google Hell)?
Posted by Melanie Phung on Thursday, December 20, 2007 at 12:26 pm
Breaking news: there’s more FUD about showing up in Google results!!! SSDD, as they say.
Google has announced they’re getting rid of the supplemental index, but I honestly don’t see what the big deal is. If your pages were crappy (or irrelevant or obscure or esoteric, or whatever gets them banished into the supplemental index), why would placing them into the main index make them any more likely to rank well? In other words, if your page is no good, what’s the difference between being in the supplemental index and being ranked #568 on some long-tail query?
“Oh, but supplemental results aren’t recrawled as often.” Right, but so what? No guarantee you’ll get crawled more often just because they combined the two indexes/indices now. “Oh, but my site didn’t deserve to be in the supplemental index in the first place!” But the point is that Google thought it did; and Google is still not going to think you deserve to rank well.
All the things you needed to do to get out of Supplemental Hell are the same things you’re still going to have to do to get found and showing up high in the results… and now you’re competing with that much more garbage in the main index.
The only stuff of mine I ever saw in Google’s Supplemental Hell was a lot of duplicate content stuff that I never wanted crawled in the first place. If anything, this change will make it harder for me to get Google to spend its resources on the pages I want it to be indexing. As far as I’m concerned, Google is just dumping garbage back into the main index.
Not an improvement for webmasters or searchers.
Original Google Webmaster Central post here:
Suppose Shakespeare wrote stuff and didn’t promote it. It would be just as good, but it wouldn’t rank. Same thing with good writing and 0 PR pages.
Great, let’s get some discussion going here.
Paul - did you have a decent amount of inbound links coming to those pages, or were the only links internal? How were your inbound links distributed? For example, were 90% of your inbound links going to the homepage, or was it more evenly distributed with deep links into lower-level pages? Are you just talking about a single page that’s now ranking, or are we talking about something replicatable?
I’m not sure I’d use the word “fair” in this context. The fact that some companies have resources to buy links and others don’t might be “unfair”, yes. But whether there’s one big index or two separate ones isn’t an issue of fairness.
As for Google doing a good job deduping … I hope so. It really was a mess before they moved my dupes into the SI. A mess, I tell ya!
Gab: I appreciate the Bard as much as the next person, but I’m not sure what you’re getting at.
If the Bard wrote stuff on the Web and didn’t promote it, of course it would still be good writing. But would the man be trying to sell stuff to consumers via free Web traffic? And would it matter if he was ranked on page 50 or not at all?
The people who are most invested in what this latest Supplemental Index thing means aren’t writing good stuff for the sake of writing good stuff. They are actively trying to promote it.
I think what you might be getting at is that it’s unfair for me to characterize everything that fell into Supplemental as crap. And certainly that is not what I meant. Rather: there’s a lot of crap in that index. What I meant by “if your page is no good” is “if your page isn’t considered good by Google”.
Hope that makes sense.
So, do I have a point? Let’s discuss.
I’m not sure…I’ve had valid pages in the supplemental index and for the life of me I couldn’t get them out. I redesigned my internal linking structure, even used nofollow but it seems like either Google was slow to catch the sitewide change or it just wasn’t working.
Either way. A page that wasn’t searchable before now is, and ranks well.
It could be a fluke, I haven’t had a chance to do a real in depth analysis of what it’s done for me…but on the surface, it seems like a good deal. It seems to make everything fair game. I’m sure Google still filters the duplicate content and stuff, it’s just they can probably do it now without the use of a separate index.
Paul