Fixing pages in Google's Supplemental results » YugaTech

Fixing pages in Google’s Supplemental results

Wait, what does it really mean if your pages are in Google’s Supplemental results? Matt Cutts of Google previously answered this in his video here but some of you might be still confused (or oblivious) about it. And though he says there’s nothing to really worry about, it pays to be diligent and informed.

However, the general knowledge is that if your web pages are in the Supplemental results, these pages are least likely to show on regular search results and thus will get you little to no traffic at all. So, imagine if you have 1,000 entries in your blog and 400 of them are in the supplemental results. That means only the other 600 pages will get to attract more traffic while they’re buried in your archives.

How do you know how much of your blog or website are in the supplemental results, then?

To check all of your pages indexed by Google, type “site:www.domain.com” in Google search.

To check all of the pages in the supplemental results of Google, type “site:www.domain.com *** -sjpked” in Google search

(Note: replace domain.com with your full blog URL, e.g. www.yugatech.com/blog/)

Here’s how it would look like in Google:

Google Supplemental Results

What could cause these pages to go into the supplemental results?

1.) Internal linking structure (not enough links pointing to these pages)
2.) Duplicate content (monthly archive pages, category pages, paged comments can cause duplicate contents). Same is true with duplicate content outside of your blog/website on another domain.
3.) Excessive link exchanges, especially with irrelevant websites/blogs

I also pointed out some canonical issues before and you can also check this tip on an SEO-friendly WordPress setup.

Abe Olandres

Abe is the founder and Editor-in-Chief of YugaTech with over 20 years of experience in the technology industry. He is one of the pioneers of blogging in the country and considered by many as the Father of Tech Blogging in the Philippines. He is also a technology consultant, a tech columnist with several national publications, resource speaker and mentor/advisor to several start-up companies.

https://www.yugatech.com

3 Comments

Janna says:

17 years ago

Is Google running out of server space? Maybe they’re prioritizing new pages and delegating the older pages to the supplemental results server?

Here’s another reason for supplemental results: The pages look almost quite similar.

I guess that’s the bane of WP sites.
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Andrew says:

17 years ago

The main cause is duplicate content. Blogs, CMS (-driven sites) and forums tend to produce more duplicate content than other kinds of sites. That’s because too many pages contain the same content. Like daily archives, monthly archives, category archives. Just imagine if you assign all your posts to multiple categories. Google will see everything as the same. But to me that’s not a cause for concern as long as each of your posts are properly crawled and not branded as supplemental. One other cause are too many &’s in the url structure. Google hates those.
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