Is the Supplemental Index Really Dead?
Posted on January 23, 2008
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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
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