Is the Supplemental Index Really Dead?

Posted on January 23, 2008
Filed Under Search Engine Optimization | Leave a Comment

Back on December 17 a Google representative announced the end of the Supplemental Index. Well at least that’s how I think it was supposed to read. You can read the post on Google’s Webmaster Central blog here.

I’m pulling some of the more salient parts of the post below:

“We improved the crawl frequency and decoupled it from which index a document was stored in…”

“…the “supplemental result” tag itself—which only served to suggest that otherwise good documents were somehow suspect—was eliminatated a few months ago.”

“Now we’re coming to the next major milestone in the elimination of the artificial difference between indices: rather than searching some part of our index in more depth for obscure queries, we’re now searching the whole index for every query.”

What are we to make of the concept that pages banished to the SI were ‘otherwise good documents’? What does that mean anyway? The documents in the SI were good documents except for what flaw? Lack of quality content? Lack of original content?

But let’s let that all fall away for now. It doesn’t matter. But here’s what does…

They are not saying that the SI no longer exists, they say merely that the algorithm will consider documents from both indicies.

OK

But consider this - when a document goes SI, it almost always gets it’s page rank stripped. And despite the fact that other factors are part of Googles ranking formula, page rank still comprises a very important part of the algorithm.

Over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing some insights about how this may or may not be affecting you. We’ll conduct some tests about how well pages do from both sides of the index and show you the results.

Nancy

After a Too Long Absence…

Posted on January 13, 2008
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I’m back here at GiantSlayer.net after an admittedly too long absence. What I hadn’t counted on was the drain on my time that supporting our wonderful community at LiveBlueprints.com would take. For those of you who don’t know about LiveBlueprints, I’m not going to plug it here but it’s our community that started out giving people a blueprint to follow to get page 1 rankings on Google. After we launched we got a lot of folks who wanted general information for beginners so we created a beginners blueprint we gave all our paid SEO members access to for free. That has grown and developed so much that we have re-named it the Business Blueprint. And our final forray was to launch our Ecommerce Blueprint that has our Super Cart hosting (enhanced x-cart) and our first enrollees are now seeing the difference having the right cart, found on the search engines can make in their efforts to grow their own ecommerce business.

So the long story short is we ended up launching 3x the content and support we had planned on late summer 2007. As that started to settle in we moved into the Christmas season where we make a substantial amount of our full year monies on our ecommerce sites and that was another business element taking up my time.

I apologize for not being here for the last several months but can now feel comfortable commiting here a minimum of 1x - 2x a week going forward. I have plenty to share so stay tuned.

We are also going to beef up the free content section at LiveBlueprints and I’ll be letting folks here know when new content is up. For now you may want to watch my discussion at Yanik Silver’s seminar last year about why SEO’ing for Long Tail is a waste of time. Find it here: http://liveblueprints.com/file.php/2/NancyUGIIIpart1/NancyUGIIIpart1.html

Nancy

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