What are they?

When a search is made for a keyword, results are obtained from many websites. If there was a website called ‘shoes-bags.com’ which sells both items and their website contains loads of information on both items, when you search for shoes this information is shown on the results page, but when you search for bags, nothing comes up in the results page.

What has happened is that Google doesn’t think that the information on your web pages which are relevant to bags is as important as the information pertaining to shoes. Google accords them different ‘weightage’ and puts the web pages considered less important into a separate ‘folder’ which they call Supplemental Results and these don’t show on their results pages.

If the website contains two .html pages on both shoes and bags each, the ‘bags.html’ is not considered and is not shown when a search is made on bags, but the ‘shoes.html’ pages will be shown when someone searches for shoes. Therefore, the two types of pages are called respectively ‘normal index’ and ‘supplemental index’.

How are they seen?

A query can be made at the Google search. If you want to see how many supplemental pages there are use this query: “site:www.—-.com *** -view. Leaving a space before and after ***. Now each search result that appears from now on will have a green tag attached to it which says “supplemental results’. This will enable you to get an idea of which pages on the site will NOT be considered and will NOT be shown on Google’s results page. Supplemental results are actually natural, even Google has hoards of them.

What causes supplementary pages?

For one, Google may think that you have duplicate content, even if it isn’t true. Or you may have posts which are too short so that Google cannot make sense of your content. You may have pages which are generated by a template which often results in repeated content on each page or you don’t use Meta tags properly and this could mean the search engine spiders have trouble detecting content from the body of text.

Other reasons include poor linking structures. This is one of the most significant reasons. If you have used template generated pages which contain no links you will probably be ignored because your pages are considered redundant. This causes Google to make the decision that your pages are not important and pushes them into the supplemental index.

Another important reason for being pushed into the supplemental index is not distributing your PR equally. Internal linking is vital if you want to promote yourself. You must link all new posts on your site so that people can read them. If you don’t some pages will have more PR than others and as Google attributes importance based on PR you have to ensure that none of your pages are deprived of Page Rankings.

How do you stay away from getting supplemental indexed?

Firstly, make sure that all your posts are linked to another post and make them easily accessible to visitors. On this note, write only good quality content so that you can get as much quality inbound links as possible.

When you post your articles don’t tag them into more than one category because this creates duplicate entries in each directory. Don’t encourage duplicate content either. Make sure your articles are not a repetition of what has previously been posted and add different keywords,

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