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Getting out of Google’s supplemental index

Are you one of those webmasters who’s got caught in Google’s supplemental indexing hell recently? It seems in the past few months in September and October especially, more and more websites are getting trashed and dumped in Google’s supplemental index. The question asked by most of those who are affected by this Google algorithmic filter is how their sites ended up in there in the first place, and how to get out Google’s supplemental index.
Before we dive into the nitty-gritty details of how we may reverse this devastating Google affect using white hat SEO, we need to take a closer look at the websites affected by it and what Google’s own definition of supplemental index is.

How can you tell what pages are in the supplemental index?

If your website contains less than a few dozen web pages you have an easy job to find any supplemental pages. Simply enter into Google’s search box the “site” command followed by your website address and page through the results to look for supplemental pages.

site:www.mydomain.com

The supplemental pages are identified wit the word “Supplemental Result” followed by “Cached” and “Similar pages” links. If you don’t see the phrase “Supplemental Result” below the search listing, your page is not in the supplemental index, it’s as simple as that.

What is Google’s supplemental index?

For starters, here is Google’s definition of their supplemental index.

"A supplemental result is just like a regular web result, except that it's pulled from our supplemental index. We're able to place fewer restraints on sites that we crawl for this supplemental index than we do on sites that are crawled for our main index. For example, the number of parameters in a URL might exclude a site from being crawled for inclusion in our main index; however, it could still be crawled and added to our supplemental index.

If you're a webmaster, please note that the index in which a site is included is completely automated; there's no way to select or change the index in which a site appears. Please also be assured that the index in which a site is included doesn't affect its PageRank."

Although there is no direct way you can influence which pages of your site will be in the regular or supplemental index, you can take steps not to let your site get put into Google’s supplemental index in the first place. Google is telling webmasters, if your site is difficult to crawl or deemed to be of low quality without much to differentiate it with unique content from other sites in your market segment your site will be place in a second rate low quality index.

What makes pages end up in Google’s supplemental index?

In our experience the top reasons why web pages go supplemental are:

1. The web page no longer exists, but it’s still in Google’s index
2. A web page is orphaned with no internal links pointing to it or buried too deep to be crawled regularly
3. Indexing issues due to redirect, java script navigation or too many parameters in the URL or SessionIDs are used
4. A duplicate page exists somewhere on the same website or externally
5. The page contains the same Title, and META tags as many other pages on the website
6. Not enough internal or external inbound links to give weight to the page
7. Hundreds of unrelated external links on one page

Can supplemental pages rank well?

A definite NO. Since the trust level Google puts on supplemental pages are so low, they are rarely if ever come on top of the search results for even moderately competitive keyword phrases. Generally supplemental pages are displayed in the search results in response to some weird or long 4-6 word phrase queries. Take a look at this search example I came up with looking for the famous book “To Kill a Mocking” Bird by Harper Lee with a twist "killing a mockingbird"+foo. As you can see almost all the results are pulled from the supplemental index.

Steps you can take to get out Google’s supplemental index

First of all, you have to understand that each website is unique and what works for one site may not work for another, that’s why it’s important to try as many of our suggestions as possible until your site or pages are put back in Google’s regular index.

1. Review your site’s Title, META description, and META keyword tags, make sure they are unique and reflect the pages content accurately.
2. Make your domain name look consistent to the Google crawler, redirect your domain to either with the “www” prefix or without. Make sure you use a 301 permanent redirect.
3. Remove duplicate content from your website, use copyscape.com to check for either external or internal content duplication.
4. Gain some authority by submitting to DMOZ.org, the Yahoo directory and other niche domains with highly trusted authority in your genre. Google trusts the judgments of human editors over its crawlers.
5. Find orphaned pages in Google’s supplemental listing and either link to these pages or remove them from your site.
6. Look for extra long URLs on your site and use mod rewrite rules to shorten them.
7. Create a site map to allow the Google crawlers easy access to all your web pages.
8. Submit your site using the Google Site Map to ensure all your web pages are indexed regularly.
9. Increase your website’s link popularity with by deep linking to pages on your website which have fallen into Google supplemental index.

In conclusion

Google’s supplemental index hell is no fun to be in, so plan your website’s launch or expansion wisely. Don’t forget to get rid of those long URLs or session id’s and also pay attention to those Title and META tags, make sure they are unique on each page. Check your website for broken links at least once a week with a free link checking tool like Xenu to make sure there are no broken links on your site.

If all else fails, and your site can’t shake those supplemental page blues, send a re-inclusion request to Google and follow Matt Cutts advice how to beg like a grown up to Google.