Are You in Favor of the Supplemental Results Being Flushed Down the Drain?
It wasn’t so long ago when SEO experts were still figuring out what the supplemental index was and how we could avoid falling prey to its claws. Here in SEOChecklist and possibly in many other SEO blogs, the supplemental index is still mentioned relatively often. Over the course of 2007, however, Google was taking steps into eradicating supplemental results. Indeed, by July, Google stopped tagging supplemental results as, well, “Supplemental Results.” What happened was that there’s now only a thin line demarcating the main index from the supplemental index results and we expected that line to thin a lot more in the following days. Indeed, last December, Google announced the death of supplemental index although my searches still seem to have one. Perhaps it takes some time.
Moving on: reactions to this move by Google have been, suffice it to say, varied. As is the nature of humans, disagreements ensue and everyone has his own say on the matter. On one hand, many marketers and web site owners were livid. They’re angry that their web sites would be classified with web sites which used to be in the supplementary index, many of which are scraper and spam web sites. On the other hand, some are thankful because they finally stand a fighting chance against bigger, more established web sites in their niches. At the same, in view of the December announcement, it seems Google is improving the indexing and the Googlebot could index web sites a lot deeper than before.
As of current, it’s still too early to determine the effects of the supplemental index being eradicated. As long as I’m still seeing supplemental results on my searches and as long as there are still irrelevant results thrown into the main index search pages, we’ll just have to wait and see how this goes.
