Google Announces the Death of the Supplemental Index

In a what is probably an incredible feat of engineering, Google has announced that the Supplemental index is no more. Whilst we had an inkling of this earlier in the year when they removed the "Supplemental Result" label, it is still a significant milestone.

On the other hand, the issues that used to cause a page to "go supplemental" or into "Google Hell" as it has been coined for the process, have not entirely gone away. For an SEO the identification of these issues is one of the processes we go though, and that isn’t going to change. Your site still has a better chance of attracting search engine traffic if those elements that used to make a page appear in the Supplemental Index are dealt with.

Supplemental acted as a flag for Googlebot to visit a page less often – one of the reasons getting out was relatively time consuming. There still have to be some flags for Googlebot to use to determine a revisit frequency – it would be a monumental task to visit every page on the Internet every day – they have just evolved. They are likely a bit smarter, a bit more elegant, but they will still exist. And it will still be an SEOs job to make a website more findable.

Related Posts

1. What is the Supplemental Index?
2. Does the Supplemental Index still exist but in another form?
3. More on the Supplemental Index
4. How to get out of the Supplemental Index
5. Supplemental Results In Google?
6. Supplemental Results No Longer Flagged By Google
7. No Results in Google due to Sandbox or Supplemental
8. Google search WITHOUT supplemental results

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 20th, 2007 at 2:28 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.