Supplemental results - death of a friend?

Supplemental results have been around for sometime (prior 2003 according to Google), although they only fairly recently, early 2006, surfaced into the online community as a hot topic for discussion after the infrastructure update by Google called Big Daddy. This update resulted in a new crawl/caching system used by Google : “Images below are taken from Matt Cutts for illustrative purposes”

Improvements with this update included smarter crawling and better indexing, aimed at helping to improve bandwith reduction. Without getting too distracted off the topic at hand, the crucial part of this update to remember is the new indexing timeline from Google. Simply put, without links, you won’t get crawled or indexed. Adding a few links will increase crawling and the indexing, more links, the more pages crawled and indexed. Welcome Supplemental Results. For those not too sure exactly what supplemental results are? Below Matt Cutts Video Explanation:

For the simplest explanation of supps(supplemental results), supplemental pages will not appear within the main index/search results unless no results are highly relevant to your search query. Google has maintained their stance that this supplemental index is getting fresher all the time, so pages are not “doomed” to the supps index.

Now in the SEM industry some people tend to focus on supps as a negative and for those sites that do have have enough links/content and perhaps with obscure URL’s, they tend to end up within the supplemental index. Personally I like to see supps, as it gives me something to work with and improve the site overall when things are not going so well, or wondering what is happening with a site’s traffic stats dropping.

It was blogged about some time back about the Google Query to view supplemental results (this query changes when posted online, the formula changes ever so slightly, so don’t be alarmed by seeing someone else posting a different version), the basic query I found

site:mvisearch.com *** -asdfgh

previously worked, although from running a few checks the last few days, i’ve noticed it is not delivering the same results to when I first used it, looks like this fella is officially dead from my side.

Shortly after Matt Mentioned at SMX Seattle that he preferred to “do away” with the supplemental label as he was afraid that certain Webmasters are

fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO.

The same with certain people obsessing about our favourite topic TBPR.

We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO

Google Officially announced on their Blog, that they will be doing away with the supps label in the results, Google Supplemental Announcement

Let’s hope that Google stays true with the index getting fresher, this will also possibly put a new spin on SEO services that are provided, with no label for supps in the site: query,(even though there are still supplemental results) solutions will need to be solid to avoid falling temporary into the supplemental index.