Google’s Supplemental Hell Exposed?

Posted • May 7, 2007 • Comments Off

Everybody’s talking about “Supplemental Hell” now days, with Forbes reporter Andy Greenberg’s very biased article “Condemned To Google Hell” this week, Rand is jumping on the bandwagon with his Whiteboard Friday this week. Rand also gives us some secret information on the topic shh!

Whiteboard Friday – “Supplementary My Dear Watson” from SEOmoz and Rand Fishkin.

Some thoughts from Matt Cuts:

I’d agree with most of your video and your bullet points, but lean more toward Michael’s viewpoint on bullet point #2; duplicate content doesn’t make you more likely to have pages in the supplemental index in my experience. It could be a symptom but not a cause, e.g. lots of duplicate content implies lots of pages, and potentially less PageRank for each of those pages. So trying to surface an entire large catalog of pages would mean less PageRank for each page, which could lead to those pages being less likely to be included in our main web index. I’m not aware of an explicit mechanism whereby duplicate content is more likely to be in our supplemental results, but I’m also happy to admit that as supplemental results are different from webspam, I’m not the expert at Google on every aspect of supplemental results.

One fine point to make: when people see the “show duplicate results” link at the end of search results and click it to add “&filter=0″ as an extra parameter, the new results you see are not all from the supplemental results. Lemme see if I can find a query to demonstrate that. Ah, here we are, the first one I tried. [site:mattcutts.com foxmarks] returns one result. If I click to see more results, that post has also been indexed at other urls, but at least two of the extra urls are in our main web index, not the supplemental index.

Maybe it’s not really Google Hell after all, just purgatory?

late,
Gary

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