It was over a year ago now that Google announced the death of the supplemental index, but does that mean that pages that at that time were in this "secondary" index have moved to the main index?
In simplified terms, there used to be 2 versions of Google’s index – there was an index for main and important pages, and there was a secondary index called the supplemental index that would be used if results couldn’t be served from the main index. Pages in the main index would be re-indexed 2-5 times per month (give or take), but pages in the supplemental index would only be re-crawled every couple of months.
I’ve been working on a reasonably new campaign for a number of months, and was noticing that none of the pages that we had been optimising had actually been recrawled since before we began working on the site. This meant that although these pages should be ranking there or thereabouts for a number of keywords, the site was virtually invisible, and the only page that was being crawled with any frequency was the sites home page.
This also resulted in the home page being the only one that drove any visitors to the site, and was limiting the effectiveness of the optimisation work we had done on the site, purely because these other now changed pages weren’t being re-assessed.
The only real solution to getting out of the supplemental index in the past was to increase the trust and PageRank of a site (and not the toolbar PageRank – the real PageRank), so that the site would be seen as more of an authority by the search engines. This was the solution for my clients site that we’ve been working on, and after 4 months of pushing the link building as hard as we felt we could there was still no sign of the site being re-indexed, which was frustrating in the run up to Christmas when there was high demand for the clients products.
Last week we also reported a Toolbar PageRank update and at the same time as this happened, my clients site was finally re-crawled and all the deep pages of the site were finally re-assessed. The result was a Toolbar PageRank score increase for the site and a massive surge in the visibility of the site in Google – there had previously been only a handful of rankings in the top 100 positions on Google UK, and now all bar 3/4 phrases are in top positions and in an area where they may now receive traffic. As well as this, there was finally evidence of pages other than the home page appearing in the search engines.
This was sadly a couple of weeks late to catch the Christmas market, but the site is well positioned to receive a good boost to organic traffic in the New Year, and this should help the site get some extra sales!
In short, the supplemental index seems to still exist, even if it isn’t as visible as it’s been in the past, and the same techniques that were employed to get out of this when it officially existed still seem to be effective at negating this phenomenon.
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